


The Past is Haunted, the Future is Laced

by paperstorm, Yusevna



Series: Under the Dome [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Bottom Bucky Barnes, Bottom Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Domestic Avengers, Embedded Images, Emo superheroes, Established Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Explicit Sexual Content, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Hydra gets its groove back, M/M, Natasha Romanov Is a Good Bro, Nomad Steve Rogers, POV Alternating, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sad Handjobs, Sam Wilson Is a Good Bro, Torture, Wakanda (Marvel), White Wolf Bucky Barnes, the violence is in chapter 7, they all need hugs tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-24
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2020-12-07 19:54:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 62,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20981468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperstorm/pseuds/paperstorm, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yusevna/pseuds/Yusevna
Summary: “I have an idea,” Natasha begins, cautiously. “That neither of you are going to like.”Sam doesn’t look up from the pair of boots he’s re-lacing. “Then it’s probably a bad one.”Natasha rolls her eyes and leans back in her chair, crossing her arms petulantly. “You wanna hear it before you make stupid comments?”“Fine, go ahead.”“I think we should bring in Barnes.”//Four months after the events of Captain America: Civil War, a new faction of Hydra resurfaces at an abandoned Soviet base in Kazakhstan. Steve, Natasha, and Sam, on the run as international fugitives and trying to pick of the pieces of their shattered lives, decide to eradicate the terror cell before it can bring harm to civilians. Bucky, despite enjoying the safety of his new home in Wakanda, decides to go with them. They embark on a mission together, struggling as much with their own personal baggage as they do with Hydra’s enormously destructive plans.





	1. Trigger

**Author's Note:**

> This story is our offering for the 2019 Captain America Big Bang. It is part of a series, but it can also stand on it's own and you won't be lost if you don't read the others. Fic title is from the song 'Big Black Car' by Gregory Alan Isakov.
> 
> **Author's note**: I had so much fun with this story, exploring the emotional and interpersonal dynamics of four strong-willed adults on the run together, resulting in a mess of characters trying their best but not always being particularly good to each other, fighting, being selfish at times, but underneath it all loving each other fiercely. This fic took me out of my comfort zone at times and was intensely frustrating at times and I'm really proud of the result. A mountain of thanks to my amazing beta [Ignisentis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ignisentis/pseuds/Ignisentis) for quick, thorough work, fantastic suggestions, and general cheer-leading. The art my lovely partner Yusevna created is GORGEOUS, has such nice details and is soaked with emotion, and I had such a fantastic time working with her.
> 
> **Artist's note**: This is my first Big Bang, and I've been incredibly fortunate to partner with a gifted author whose work is SO inspiring to me, and who also offered wonderful guidance. My immense gratitude goes to her, and also to the mods who put this all together. Thank you!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Easy!” she gripes at Sam, wincing as his fingertips are rough on the gash along her ankle. He’s stitching it up, probably as gently as he can, but it still stings every time the needle pierces her skin. “I don’t need more scars.”  
  
“I’m not a surgeon,” he returns, tongue briefly peeking out between his lips as he concentrates. “You’ll probably have a scar no matter how careful I am.”  
  
“Fabulous.” She clenches her teeth and breathes through the pain until he’s finished, tying off the thread and covering the stitches with a bandage that will likely rip the hair off her legs when she removes it. Razors aren’t easy to come by, it turns out, in the international fugitive lifestyle. But one square of waxed ankle isn’t exactly a solution.  
  
“Is she alright?” Steve asks from the quinjet’s cockpit, frowning over his shoulder at them. His dark blond hair and beard are longer than Natasha’s ever seen them, so far removed from the clean-cut, all-American Captain Rogers she met four years ago. He’d looked like a vintage war propaganda poster, then, in his khakis and pressed shirts, with his trusting blue eyes and gentle sweep of blond hair. Now he looks rogue, and tired, and like a man without a home. But he is, and they all do.  
  
Sam spreads his arms out and grins, the eternal optimist of their band of travelling criminals. “Thanks entirely to my incredible skills, she’s gonna live!”  
  
“You’re a miracle worker,” she deadpans, sarcastic as a reflex, but she does genuinely smile, because she is grateful. Without Bruce and Tony’s tech, they’ve been lacking in medical care. Sam definitely isn’t a surgeon, but his experience with last-resort wound-patching on the battlefield has certainly come in handy.  
  
Sam smiles back, and reaches into their cooler to hand her a bottle of water before he joins Steve in the cockpit. Natasha twists the cap off and takes a long sip, and then uses a few splashes on her fingers to wash away the blood around the bandage. Out the front window of the jet, the sun is just starting to peek over the horizon, quicker than it normally would because they’re heading East toward it at a fairly break-neck speed. She joins the boys, standing behind Steve and leaning over the back of his chair to look out the window.  
  
“Never get used to that sight, do you?” Sam asks.  
  
The sky turns pink and orange before their eyes, as they zip through the early morning air. “There are perks, I guess, to losing your team and your country and all your friends.”  
  
“Hey, you still got us,” Steve points out.  
  
Natasha chews at the inside of her lip to keep from smiling too obviously. She does miss the others. If she thinks too long about Clint and Bruce she’ll start crying or yelling and won’t be able to stop. She misses having clear direction, having Tony’s gadgets to help them in the field, having a room and a bed and knowing where she was going to sleep each night. But she could do much worse in terms of company than Steve and Sam. A lot of things could be worse.  
  
“Lucky me.”  
  
* * *  
  
  
Three days later, he checks on Natasha’s stitches as Steve lands the jet in a deserted field in Illinois just after midnight. There’s no puckering or swelling along the stitches, and the skin is starting to fuse itself back together in between his uneven handiwork. Sam was never properly trained as a medic, he just picked up bits of the trade while on overseas tours because active war zones are chaotic and there isn’t always a doctor around at the exact moment someone starts bleeding. It’s come in handy, since the three of them have been on their own.  
  
“Looks good,” he tells her. “It might not even scar too bad, if you did actually care about that.”  
  
She shrugs, in her flippant, casual way, where sometimes it appears as if nothing really gets to her. “Just one more for the collection.”  
  
“Chicks think scars are sexy.”  
  
“Good to know.” She shakes her head before lifting her foot back down off the bench.  
  
The quinjet lands smoothly – Steve’s getting a lot better at that – and he opens the loading door out the back so they can survey their home for the evening.  
  
“At least it’s not too cold,” Natasha says, as she steps out onto scraggly grasses and weeds.  
  
A protective ring of trees surrounds them, with the faint noise from the highway to the north, and a massive dark blue sky glittered with starlight. A permanent place with a nice bed and a hot shower and coffee and breakfast guaranteed in the morning would be far preferable, but Sam always likes the nights they sleep on the jet much more than the nights they spend at safehouses when Natasha can locate them. Safehouses all too often have rats, and shoddy heat, and neighbours that scream at each other in Slavic languages through paper-thin walls. They remind him far too much of active duty. Of nights spent in barracks, of sand as far as the eye could see and yet somehow still freezing temperatures, of growing attached to people around him just to watch them leave, or suffer, or be taken away in a coffin. He lost Riley, he couldn’t bear losing Steve and Natasha. And he feels that more acutely than he’s ever expressed to either of them.  
  
“Are we good?” Steve calls to them, from the cockpit.  
  
“Yeah,” Natasha calls back. “Shields up, Mr. Sulu.”  
  
“I don’t get that reference.”  
  
Natasha grins at Sam again. “I know,” she says, only loud enough for Sam to hear.  
  
A soft tinkling sound, like a handful of coins being poured into a glass bowl, fills the air for a moment as the invisible barrier is constructed around them, hiding them from sight and protecting them from radar detection. Steve joins them a minute later, looking around and nodding his added approval.  
  
Natasha wanders off, walking toward the trees, exploring their surroundings. Sam, instead, tips his head back to look up at the sky. Steve stays next to him.  
  
“You don’t get stars like that in Manhattan.”  
  
“Or DC,” Sam agrees. “You miss it?”  
  
“Manhattan?”  
  
Sam nods, and Steve shrugs.  
  
“Not the city, specifically.”  
  
“Your other friends, then?”  
  
Steve looks at him, frowning in the darkness. “You aren’t a poor replacement for them, if that’s what you’re thinking. Nobody’s ever stuck by me the way you have. You didn’t have to get involved in any of this.”  
  
“I’m just that stupid, huh?” Sam jokes, but Steve doesn’t smile.  
  
“It means more than you know.”  
  
Looking down at the ground, Sam smiles to himself, but then shakes it off. “Okay, Hallmark.”  
  
“I don’t –”  
  
“Get the reference, yeah, I know.” Sam chuckles. Sometimes he thinks Steve must be joking about that. Like maybe he’s figured out it makes them laugh and says it to lighten the mood, instead of an actual indication of confusion.  
  
30 feet away, Natasha starts to spin. Her arms go above her head, rounded and fingertips almost touching, and she twirls around twice before leaping gracefully and landing silently on her feet.  
  
“What are you doing?” Steve asks her, not a yell but loud enough for her to hear.  
  
“Ballet,” she answers, twirling again. “For balance, and coordination, and general badassery.”  
  
They watch, as she floats through the moonlight, and Sam claps and calls, “bravo, Bellissima!”  
  
“Brava,” Steve corrects, and Sam snickers.  
  
“You speak Italian?”  
  
“Barely. Picked up enough to get by, during the war. Bucky was better at it.”  
  
“Come lift me,” Natasha demands.  
  
With a grin in Steve’s direction, Sam obeys, jogging towards her.  
  
She takes his hands and puts them on her waist. “Lift and throw me up a little,” she instructs. “And then catch me by hugging around my thighs.”  
  
“Kinky,” he jokes, and she rolls her eyes but reluctantly laughs.  
  
“Just do it.”  
  
Sam tries, and nearly drops her the first time. He can hear Steve laughing at them, and he sends a middle finger in his direction before trying again. On the second go he manages it and walks her around in a circle while he holds her up and Steve whistles at them.  
  
In the air, Natasha extends her hand elegantly towards Steve. “Pas de trois?”  
  
“Je ne veux pas.”  
  
“Wet blanket,” Natasha teases, sticking her tongue out at him.  
  
Instead of putting her down, Sam adjusts his grip and tosses her torso over his shoulder into a fireman’s carry, marching her back toward the jet as she laughs and protests. She could struggle herself free if she wanted to, but she doesn’t.  
  
“Aw, the show’s over?” Steve asks.  
  
“It’s bedtime, kids. We got gangsters to take down tomorrow,” Sam responds, carrying Natasha right onto the jet before he puts her down.  
  
“Yes, Dad,” she grumbles jokingly.  
  
Steve shuts the door, and Sam gets their pillows and blankets and foam mats out from a storage compartment. He sets his up nearest to the door, subconsciously wanting to protect even though it’s locked and they’re inside a barrier that can’t be penetrated without them knowing about it. He strips out of his uniform, hoping sooner than later they’ll find a safehouse with laundry facilities because it’s been several weeks since he’s been able to wash the sweat and grime and blood from his clothes. By the time he gets settled into his makeshift bed, Steve is already asleep in his own, breathing steadily across the room, his massive shoulders curled in as he hugs himself under his blanket.  
  
Sam meets Natasha’s eyes. “How the fuck does he do that?”  
  
“The serum, probably.” She lies back, settling on her side and smiling at him. “Night, Sam.”  
  
He returns it, and she rolls over, facing away from him.  
  
Sam lies awake for a little longer than the others, missing his queen-sized bed in DC in the townhouse he loved and will probably never see again. It isn’t the end of the world. There are probably worse ways to spend his life than on the run with these two. And he made his choice, like Steve said, months ago. Picked a side, knowingly broke American and international law, escaped from prison. There’s no going back, now.  
  
* * *  
  
  
_A__ siren wails just outside the thin walls. The Soldier’s heart leaps into his throat, panicked just for a moment until the noise steadily lessens, getting further away, not coming for him. Not today. It doesn’t mean he’s safe, it only means he’s safe for now. He lives in a perpetual state of ‘for now’. But it’s been three weeks since his escape, since the machine fell from the sky and dropped the man with the blond hair into the water below. Three weeks since the Soldier remembered. Three weeks since flashes of someone else’s life tore through him like shrapnel, three weeks since his head felt like it was splitting as the fabric of his reality was torn apart, three weeks since he didn’t know why he had to save the man who called him ‘Bucky’ but he knew he had to save him nonetheless._  
  
_The Soldier hasn’t ever been out of the ice chamber for three full weeks before. He doesn’t know how he knows that, either. But he knows it._  
  
_When the sirens disappear, far enough away that they can’t be heard anymore, the Soldier goes back to the glossy magazine he’d been reading. ‘Time’, it’s called. The cover page is outlined in bright red. A picture of the blond man embossed onto thick paper shines in the low light from the ceiling fixture. The man is standing, tall and broad-shouldered, in a tight uniform the colors of the American flag. He’s holding a round, matching shield with a star in the center. The Soldier remembers that shield, from the fight on the machine in the sky. The man had dropped it. Tossed it aside, let it slip through a hole in the floor and down into the river to be lost, maybe forever._  
  
_Had told the Soldier, “I’m not going to fight you. You’re my friend.”_  
  
_The Soldier can still hear those words, echoing in his mind. Bouncing off the walls of his skull. Burning like a brand when he thinks about them too often._  
  
_The corresponding article in the magazine is from a few years ago, judging by the dates on the newspapers he steals from corner stores when he gets a chance. It’s about a man named Steve Rogers, a man born in 1918, in a place called Brooklyn that sounds familiar to the Soldier but he can’t place it. He can’t place much of anything, try as he might. He just has memories, fragments of them, floating through space without anchors to pin them down to anything solid. When he reaches to catch them, they move just out of reach. They just float._  
  
_There are more pictures, inside. The man, stoic and serious on the cover, smiles more in the additional shots. He’s next to an older man with brown hair and funny facial hair around his mouth, grinning as a third man, that one massive and long-haired and statuesque, speaks to them. Another where he’s on a white couch next to a woman with fiery red hair in curls that surround a pretty face. The Soldier doesn’t recognize any of the others, but the man, with the blond hair and the bright blue eyes and the kind smile, he knows. It’s still a floating fragment, but it’s stronger than all the others._  
  
_He closes his eyes, leans back against the brick wall behind him, and tries to quiet his mind. Tries to let go of all the noise from the street below, and the noise from smaller shards of memories, and focus._  
  
_“Steve,” he says aloud, trying it out. Testing how it feels on his tongue. He’s called Bucky, apparently. It’s kind of a stupid name. James, the man had also said. James is better, but he’s read that he’s called Bucky._  
  
_He remembers someone getting a foot taller overnight, but that doesn’t make sense. He remembers a secret about kissing. That doesn’t make sense either._  
  
_“Bucky and Steve,” he says. Inseparable, since childhood. That’s what the placard at the museum had said, when he’d broken into the exhibit just before fleeing the country._  
  
_A loud knock in the hallway startles him. He jumps, and inhales, and then another door opens and two voices happily greet each other. The voices disappear as the door closes._  
  
_The Soldier growls and throws the magazine across the room. He slumps down on the dirty mattress he’d put onto the floor, quieter than creaky bedsprings and therefore safer, bringing his legs up and curling his arms around himself. The metal on his left glints in the light and he closes his eyes. Frustrated, and scared, and annoyed with himself for being scared. It is likely only a matter of time before he’s found. More than one group of people must be looking for him, after everything he’s done. Maybe they’ll take pity on him and simply shoot him on sight. But probably not._  
  
Bucky blinks. Confused for a moment, before his surroundings filter back through his consciousness. The rounded, reddish-brown walls of the hut. His little kitchenette, his ornately carved table and two chairs, his kimoyo beads glowing on the bed beside him. The odd but functional mix of traditional and futuristic that is synonymous with the place he’s been allowed to take refuge and tentatively call home for the last four months.  
  
A dream, he thinks. Then, he looks down at himself. Sees that while he’s on his sleep mat, he isn’t lying down, and the sun is still up. He’s sitting up with his back against the wall, like he had been in Bucharest, where his mind had just been. There is a book in his hands, still open to the page he’d been reading. Turned, in his head, into the magazine with Steve on the cover. Bucky realizes he hadn’t been sleeping. He’d been reading, and then suddenly transported far away and two years into the past.  
  
Not all that concerning. Not the first time it’s happened, he’d been riddled with flashbacks when he first got here, when he was freshly out of cryostasis and still working with Shuri to remove Hydra’s decades of programming. But it has been a while since the last.   
  
He’s settled in, during the last few months. There are bad days. There are days he can’t get up, crushed under the weight of things he’s done, the lives he’s taken, the sharp, vivid memories of torture that he can never seem to get rid of and hates himself for still being affected by – after all the pain he caused, the pain that’s the hardest to handle shouldn’t be his own. But he’s recovering. Slowly, maddeningly, sometimes feeling hopeless and useless and like he’ll never get his old self back again. Sometimes not sure he even wants his old self back again. Sometimes he’s not sure of anything at all. But he carries on. He wakes up every day and he puts one foot in front of the other, and he helps out around the village, and healing is occurring. At times it’s hard to see, but it’s there when Bucky can let himself notice it.  
  
Steve visits, when he can. That varies as well. Sometimes he’s here for more than a week. Other times its just a night or two, before he’s called away again. Sometimes he brings his friends with him, and Bucky doesn’t mind that so much. Romanov is nice, if a little sarcastic at times, and Wilson is still a bit of an ass but Bucky can tolerate him because Steve seems to like him. It’s always better, when Steve’s here. The weight seems lighter, the nightmares are blurrier, the bad days are fewer. There are times when he’s getting ready to leave and Bucky wants to beg him to stay. Just a little bit longer, another day, another hour, another minute. Just to put off the ache that comes when he’s gone. He never does ask. Steve helps people, not quite like he used to with his Avengers but he still helps, and Bucky can’t ask him not to. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself.  
  
He puts the book down onto the floor. He’d already lost his page, when his fingers had gone slack as his mind slipped from reality, and he doesn’t feel like finding it again. He gets up, goes to splash some water over his face from the basin in the corner. Tries to tame his hair into a half-presentable knot at the back of his head. He’s getting better at doing that one-handed. His beard is a little longer than he likes it, but he ignores that for now. He keeps thinking one day he’ll wake up with the desire to shave it all off and cut his hair and style it like he used to, in Brooklyn nearly a century ago. The Bucky from back then would have hated how he looks now, shaggy and unkempt, skin too dark from days in the sun, coarse hair covering his cheeks and jaw. Money was tight but that Bucky always took pride in how he looked, much more than Steve ever did. Bucky’s not sure he actually likes the way he looks now, as much as he thinks this is how he _should _look now. He can’t go back to styled and clean-cut. He isn’t that person anymore. It wouldn’t be right to look like him.  
  
He changes into pants, before he starts the walk into the city. He has an appointment with Shuri this afternoon, his weekly sessions that are part of his continuing rehabilitation. He’ll be a bit early, but he can’t sit alone in his hut and marinate in his own thoughts anymore. The walk clears his head.  
  
She’s in her lab when he gets there, at the far end near the window, using her hands to manipulate purple light glowing off a white orb. The guards nod curtly at him as he enters, and she notices and abandons her work in favor of scurrying over to greet him. He’s curious about what she was doing, but doesn’t ask. She’s tried to explain so many things to him so many times, and it all sounds like a language he doesn’t speak even though he believes her that it’s English. He barely understood basic things like microwaves and cellphones in Bucharest; Wakandan technology is on a level he can’t fathom.  
  
“Progress report?” she inquires, as he hops up onto a white table. She shines a pen light into his eyes.  
  
He considers not telling her. He’s sure there’s nothing she can do about it, just like there isn’t anything she can do about the nightmares and the days where he can’t seem to stop crying. But he isn’t very good at lying, and she’s too smart not to notice, so he gets it over with. “Flashback, this afternoon. Just before I came here.”  
  
Her face folds into an expression of sympathy. “I’m sorry. I keep hoping those will cease eventually.”  
  
“They probably will. Eventually.” He shrugs, and looks down at his knees. “Not your fault, anyway.”  
  
“What happened, in it?”  
  
“I was, um. Back in Romania. Looking at pictures of Steve I’d found in a magazine. Trying to remember who he was.”  
  
“How long did it take?” she asks. “Before you remembered.”  
  
“Hard to say. It didn’t all come back in one piece. Remembered little details, and couldn’t place them at first. Maybe a month or two?”  
  
She winces, again in sympathy, and Bucky shifts uncomfortably on the table. He never quite feels he deserves that look, when she feels badly for him. She brings machines over, sending light after him, now, instead of the mysterious orb in the corner. It’s red, instead of purple, and it’s all familiar by now.  
  
“Have you spoken to Captain Rogers lately?”  
  
He shakes his head. “Not for a few days. Maybe almost a week, actually.”  
  
“Will you? Tonight?”  
  
“Because of the flashback?” When she nods, Bucky shakes his head again. “Probably not. He’s busy, don’t want to bother him.”  
  
Shuri rolls her eyes and mutters something under her breath that sounds suspiciously like _men_.  
  
Bucky doesn’t respond, and lets her work.  
  
* * *  
  
  
“Rogers where the fuck are you?” Natasha says loudly, in his earpiece.  
  
Steve ducks down behind the shell of a car, as bullets barrage the other side of it. One passes through a broken window and narrowly misses his shoulder, the heat of it singing his uniform. He presses his finger into the earpiece, answers, “taking heavy fire, by the north entrance.”  
  
She swears again, and moments later Steve hears a loud male shout, and the bullets stop. He twists around, peeking up over the car to watch Natasha expertly taking two men down, quickly and methodically like it’s easy. Sam descends on them from above and pins one to the ground with his hands behind his back, while Natasha chokes the other with an arm around his neck until he passes out and hits the dirt with a loud thump.  
  
She wipes sweat from her brow, and smirks over at Steve. “What would you do without us?”  
  
“Get shot a lot more,” Steve answers honest.  
  
“Are you hit?” Sam asks, still struggling to hold the man on the ground. He presses a knee into his back and warns, “stay down, man. I’m not gonna choke you out, but she might if you don’t knock it off.”  
  
“No, I’m fine.”  
  
“What are we doing with these two?” Natasha asks.  
  
“If you think Radar isn’t going to find you,” the man snarls, as Sam pushes his face into the dirt.  
  
“Yeah, I’m shaking in my G-string,” Natasha intones, sounding bored. She nibbles on a hangnail on her middle finger, to illustrate how completely unintimidated she is by his threats.  
  
“Interpol’s doorstep seems like a good place to drop them off,” Steve decides, walking over to help Natasha with the unconscious one.  
  
His phone buzzes, as they’re loading the two into the quinjet with zip ties around their wrists and ankles. Steve fishes it out of an inner pocket, and frowns when he reads the message from Bucky – _Call me when you can ok? Everything’s fine don’t worry._  
  
Natasha is watching him, when he looks up. “Answer it,” she tells him, knowing from his expression who it is. “We got this.”  
  
As if to prove her point, she tugs the unconscious man up the loading ramp by herself, even though he must have 100 pounds on her.  
  
Steve takes a few steps away from them and slides his thumb over the screen to initiate a call, bringing it up to his ear.  
  
“Let me guess,” Bucky’s voice says, instead of hello. “Your mission wrapped about three minutes ago, and you’re still in your suit, and you’re covered in sweat and dirt and you called me first instead of showering.”  
  
“I – no. Yes.” Steve manages to laugh at himself. “Shut up. Are you okay?”  
  
“Yeah, I’m okay.” Bucky sounds like he’s smiling, but accusing at the same time. “You said you weren’t gonna do this.”  
  
“Do what?” Steve asks defensively.  
  
“Freak out every time I call. Or every time I don’t call. Just freak out in general.”  
  
“Well.” Steve huffs. “You shouldn’t have believed me.”  
  
Bucky chuckles, low and amused and warm. “I guess not.”  
  
“Why did you want me to call, if everything’s okay?”  
  
“I’m not allowed to miss your voice?”  
  
“Oh.” Steve puts further distance between himself and the jet and sits on a fallen tree, the tension going out of his shoulders as he slumps over, resting his free arm on his knees. The adrenaline from being shot at is still buzzing through his veins, but Bucky’s voice soothes it a little. Bucky’s voice has always soothed him. Scratchy in the mornings, deep and gentle in the afternoons, breathless in the evenings. Steve loves every iteration of it. “Yeah. I miss you, too.”  
  
“Been a while, this time. I’m not …” Bucky trails off, and sighs. “Sorry. I don’t mean to make you feel bad.”  
  
“You’re not okay, are you?” Steve already knows. He can hear it in the inflection in Bucky’s voice, as sure as he knows right now Bucky’s eyebrows are furrowed in upset even though he can’t physically see it.  
  
The exhale shakes, sends static over the line, and Steve closes his eyes against the burning swell of wishing he could be there to wrap Bucky up in his arms.  
  
“More of the same,” Bucky admits. “Nightmares, and … flashbacks. Sometimes they don’t happen for a while and I think maybe it’s over. Then they come back out of nowhere, and …”  
  
“Buck,” Steve whispers, useless, helpless. It always hurts so much, to remember all the horrific things Bucky went through, and how much he still struggles to cope with them.  
  
“I really just wanted to hear your voice. I don’t want you feeling guilty that you’re not here. Just talk to me, alright? That’s enough.”  
  
It isn’t enough, and Steve feels the inadequacy of it all like a hole in his chest where Bucky should be, except he’s thousands of miles away. “What time is it, where you are?”  
  
“Maybe two or three. It’s still dark out. I couldn’t sleep.”  
  
“I could be there by the time the sun comes up.”  
  
“Steve.”  
  
“We just wrapped up, more or less. There’s some loose ends to tie up but Sam and Nat can handle that.”  
  
“Nothing coming down the pike?”  
  
“Not at the moment. I can’t guarantee something won’t come up tomorrow, but … even if it’s just one night.”  
  
“You don’t have to do that for me. It’s a long way and you’ve gotta be exhausted.”  
  
“What if I wanna do it for me?”  
  
“Do you?”  
  
“Do I miss you so much it hurts in my chest like heart failure? Yeah, I really fucking do. I miss you every time I lie down and you’re not there beside me.”  
  
“God,” Bucky mutters, shuffling in the background like maybe he’s lying back down in his bed. “Steve.”  
  
“I’m coming, alright?” Steve says, his mind already made up. “I’ll be there in a couple hours. Try to sleep, I’ll wake you up when I get there.”  
  
“Okay,” Bucky breathes.  
  
“I love you,” Steve tells him. “So damn much.”  
  
“Me too.”  
  
They’re both eyeing him as he walks back over towards the jet. “Everything alright?” Sam asks.  
  
“He says yes, but it doesn’t sound like it.”  
  
“Wouldn’t it be the middle of the night in Wakanda?”  
  
“Yeah.” Steve makes eye contact with Sam, seeing something like understanding in Sam’s eyes. The realization that it doesn’t mean anything good that Bucky is calling in the middle of the night.  
  
Natasha nods behind them at the jet. “We’ll drop you off on the way to France.”  
  
“It’s not exactly on the way.”  
  
“So, what, are you gonna walk? To Africa?” She tosses her head again, dyed blond hair brushing the tips of her shoulders. Not giving him an option to refuse. “Get in.”  
  
The sun is barely peeking over the horizon when Steve arrives in Wakanda, and he moves through the huts as inconspicuously as he can, not wanting to wake anyone up. He passes a few women, already up and tending to morning chores, and they smile at him and give him friendly waves. The whole village is used to him, now. He knows their names but he doesn’t stop to chat, this time.  
  
Bucky’s hut is dark and quiet, and Steve finds him fast asleep. The blanket that should be draped over his body is bunched up and clutched in his arm, like he needed to fall asleep hugging something and the blanket was all he had. The thought hurts in Steve’s chest. Bucky’s curled in on himself, hair messy on the pillow, his shoulders tense and a frown wrinkling his forehead even in sleep. He looks the opposite of peaceful and it makes Steve’s skin crawl.  
  
He kneels, reaching his hand out to brush hair off Bucky’s face to wake him. He tries to do it softly but Bucky startles anyway, inhaling sharply and eyes flying open, panicked. “Hey, it’s me,” Steve says quickly, holding up his hands. “Just me.”  
  
“Steve,” Bucky breathes in relief. His face relaxes, eyes going liquid. “You … hi.”  
  
“Sorry. I was trying not to scare you.”  
  
“S’okay.” Bucky shakes his head. “You’re here.”  
  
For all he’d sworn up and down that he didn’t need Steve to come tonight, the truth swims in his eyes. Steve stands back up just long enough to unzip and unclip his dirty uniform and kick out of it, and then he crawls naked onto the sleep mat. He blankets Bucky’s body with his own and then rolls over him, pulling Bucky with him so he ends up half on top of him and Steve can circle his arms around Bucky’s body, hugging him close. Bucky burrows into him, like he’s trying to climb into Steve’s skin. For a long time, they lie together, not saying a word but just tangled up and breathing, as if some kind of healing is possible by just having their bodies pressed up against each other.  
  
Bucky’s hair tickles Steve’s neck as he tucks his head under Steve’s chin, and Steve rubs his back. When he breathes, it’s shaky, like he’s desperately trying to keep his composure. Steve wishes he wouldn’t. He wishes Bucky knew that if there’s one place on earth where it’s safe to break apart, it’s right here in Steve’s arms. He reaches one hand up to comb his fingers through Bucky’s hair, and presses a kiss into his forehead, just to say, without words, that he’s here and it’s okay.  
  
“What were you doing, tonight?” Bucky asks. His voice is small, muffled against Steve’s neck.  
  
“Nothing interesting. Picked up a couple of low-level mob guys outside Chicago.” Steve doesn’t mention he’d nearly been shot.  
  
“You shouldn’t have left your friends.”  
  
“We were done anyway, Buck.” Steve keeps his fingers moving in Bucky’s soft hair, fingernails lightly scratching his scalp. “Besides, you don’t think I’d always rather be here with you?”  
  
Bucky doesn’t answer.  
  
“You lied to me,” Steve says, being gentle about it because he isn’t angry, but they still need to talk about it. “You said you didn’t need me to come tonight.”  
  
“You figured it out pretty quick,” Bucky mumbles, sounding ashamed.  
  
“That isn’t the point. You promised to tell me, when you’re struggling.”  
  
“What do you want me to do about it, Steve?” Bucky asks. He sounds exhausted, the kind that can’t be fixed just with sleep. “I can’t control it, when it happens.”  
  
“No,” Steve says quickly. “No, that isn’t what I meant at all, I know you can’t.”  
  
“Then what?”  
  
“You said you’d keep me in the loop. Even if I can’t do anything about it.”  
  
“I know I did.”  
  
“So?”  
  
“So, how can I?” Bucky leans back a little looks at him with tired, haunted eyes. “When we both know what you’d do if I did? You’d either drop everything and come here, even if it meant leaving your friends and maybe somebody getting hurt. Or you’d stay, but you’d be so distracted thinking about me that you’d fuck up and somebody would get hurt anyway.”  
  
Steve wants so badly to argue, to insist that he could handle it and it wouldn’t affect him like that, wouldn’t lead to him being careless and selfish and putting other people he loves in danger. But he can’t, because Bucky is right, and pretending he isn’t wouldn’t get them anywhere.  
  
“I have enough innocent blood on my hands,” Bucky adds. “I can’t live with more.”  
  
Steve licks his lips, and then tilts his chin forward to press them against Bucky’s.  
  
“I was back in Bucharest, this afternoon,” Bucky says into Steve’s mouth.  
  
Tipping his forehead down to rest on Bucky’s, Steve brushes their noses together.  
  
“Not really,” Bucky clarifies, needlessly. “Just in my head.”  
  
“Was it a nice memory, at least?”  
  
“Not exactly warm and fuzzy. But not too horrible either. I was looking at pictures of you. Trying to piece together who you were, and how I knew you.”  
  
“I hate how long it took us to find you. Hate that you were alone for all that time.” Steve swallows thickly, and hooks a leg over Bucky’s knees to keep him close. He hates thinking about those two years, hates thinking about Bucky so fractured and broken, with his memories shattered and his identity stripped away from him, all alone in a foreign country where for all he knew he could’ve been recaptured by Hydra at any moment. Steve understands why Bucky ran, after the helicarrier, but wishes he hadn’t. He inhales Bucky’s warm scent, kisses his lips again.  
  
“You’d think I’d be used to it by now,” Bucky says quietly. “And I am, I guess. But it still leaves me feeling …”  
  
He trails off, sighing and sounding frustrated, and Steve’s heart breaks just a little bit more. “Go easy on yourself.”  
  
“We said this was going to work, we said you wouldn’t have to rush back here in the middle of a mission to help me deal with my busted head.”  
  
“That’s not what happened. We were done, Buck, I swear. We were loading them into the jet when I got your message. It doesn’t take three of us to drop two guys off at Interpol, and besides, we had nothing else lined up. I probably would’ve been here in the next day or two anyway, even if you hadn’t called.” Steve is desperate to make him believe it, and doesn’t know if he quite succeeds. Bucky curls further into him, and Steve tightens his grip, holding handfuls of Bucky’s soft robes over his back. “I don’t know a person alive who would just be fine after everything you went through. You’re coping the best you can, no one could expect more than that.”  
  
“Shuri says there’s nothing wrong with my brain, or … anything else. It’s not physical, it’s not anything she can fix. It’s mental, I guess. Not a result of something Hydra did, just normal human shit.”  
  
“Sam says recovery isn’t linear. It won’t get steadily better every single day, there will be backward steps.”  
  
“You talk to him about me?”  
  
“I don’t tell him about the things we talk about,” Steve reassures, not wanting Bucky to think he’s running off spilling all his painful secrets. “All he knows is the stuff he already did, the stuff everybody knows.”  
  
“But you asked him. How to deal with me.”  
  
“Help,” Steve corrects. He slides his hand around to brush his thumb over Bucky’s cheekbone. “I asked him how to help you.”  
  
Bucky nods. His hand curls into a fist at the base of Steve’s back, fingers moving over bare skin.  
  
“How can I help, right now?” Steve asks. Upset is radiating off Bucky with his body heat, as much as he’s still trying to hide it.  
  
“Just this,” Bucky answers. His fingers smooth back out, fingertips pressing in at the base of Steve’s spine. “You being here is enough.”  
  
Steve kisses him, and Bucky kisses back, deepening it suddenly. His tongue asks for permission into Steve’s mouth and Steve parts his lips and lets him in, lets Bucky taste him. He wasn’t expecting Bucky to be needy in this way but he’d die before turning him down, when he’s hurting this much. He rolls on top, pressing Bucky down into the mat, surrounding him. Bucky rocks up against him, hardening against Steve’s hip.  
  
“Please,” he murmurs.  
  
“I got you,” Steve whispers. Bucky’s face is flushed, unshed tears shining in his blue eyes. He’s beautiful even soaked in tragedy. He’s been the nicest thing Steve’s eyes have ever seen since he was six years old. Nothing has ever changed that. He dips down and kisses Bucky, slow, soft, pouring as much of himself into it as he can. Trying desperately to let unspoken words float in the minute space between their bodies. He can never express it all, it’s always too big. Everything he feels, everything he’s always felt. He tries, and always comes up tongue tied.  
  
He rucks Bucky’s robes up so their bare skin can touch, so Bucky can feel him. Presses his hips down, lets his thickening cock slide alongside Bucky’s between their stomachs. Bucky shivers beneath him, kissing frantically as Steve rolls into him.  
  
“Please,” he rasps again. His hand lifts off Steve’s back for a moment, and presses a soft plastic bottle into his shoulder when it returns.  
  
“You just had that next to the bed already?” Steve jokes, trying to lighten the intensity of the moment.  
  
Bucky’s eyes squeeze shut, and the tears finally spill over. Steve’s stomach drops.  
  
“Fuck, no, I …” He kisses the salt on Bucky’s cheeks. “I’m sorry. It’s okay, Buck.”  
  
Bucky shakes his head and opens his eyes again, and there’s so much sadness in them it takes Steve’s breath away. “I thought … maybe when you got here, you could make me forget for a while,” he mumbles, shame about it burning off him.  
  
“Of course I can. You got me,” Steve promises, kissing the corner of Bucky’s mouth. He never wants Bucky to be embarrassed about needing him. Steve would need dozens of hands to count the number of times he’s been the hurting one, needing Bucky’s arms to curl up in, his warmth, his sweet words, needing Bucky to fill him up and make him whole again. “I’m right here. I love you, I’m never letting you go. Not ever again.”  
  
“Love you, too,” Bucky breathes, finding Steve’s lips in another burning kiss.  
  
Steve breaks him down slowly, inch by inch, finding his own solace in the heat from Bucky’s tanned skin. There are times when it feels like they’ve been through too much, like it’s too big a mountain to summit. But they’re here. Steve never thought he’d see Bucky again. For years, he thought the other half of his heart was gone for good and he didn’t want to live through it, and now he’s here, bruised and battered sometimes but real and solid under Steve’s hands. And as beautiful as he’s ever been.

  
  
* * *


	2. Landslide

Steve stays for three days.  
  
For three days, the nightmares seem to cease, and getting up in the mornings seems a little less impossible. Steve helps Bucky with the goats – helps him sprinkle feed for them in a line in front of their water trough and gently pats them on their small heads. They go on a hike to a high peak halfway up a mountain, and Steve holds his hand as they look out over the farmland and forests and lakes. In moonlight next to the river nearby, Steve holds around Bucky’s waist and kisses him and sways with him, taking Bucky back to warm summer nights in their tenement walk-up in Brooklyn when he’d turn the radio on and pull a reluctant Steve into his arms and dance with him in their kitchen. Bucky used to love music, and dancing. Steve never liked it as much, but Bucky always suspected that was because their double-dates consisted of both girls really wanting to go out with him and one sullen after getting stuck with Steve. Bucky lost track of how many times he’d look up from the dance floor and find Steve sitting at a table alone, his date having ditched him for someone better. Bucky could never get his head around it. There was no one better than Steve, not where he was concerned. When it was just the two of them in their apartment, Steve liked dancing just fine. Especially the slower songs, when Bucky would hold him and move with him and sing softly into his ear.  
  
He never, ever thought, back then, they’d be able to have this outside of the safety of those water-stained walls. He never believed it would be possible. He knows a few men from their unit during the war suspected there might be something between them, even if they never said anything about it, but the rules were different, during the war. Society was flipped on its head; social norms were turned inside out. Bucky always knew everything would go right back to the way it was as soon as the war was over. Right back to hiding, and lying, and to suspicious looks from neighbors because two men in their 20s lived together and never had any serious or lasting relationships. Even on his bad days, now, Wakanda is a dream. It’s safe here, and beautiful, and the people have taken care of him and asked nothing in return, and he can walk through the village holding Steve’s hand and no one has anything to say about it.  
  
Steve smiles at him, blue light from the half-moon and the stars leaving his skin and hair glowing. He dips down to kiss Bucky softly. Bucky holds tight around his shoulders, not letting Steve move away even once their lips fall apart.  
  
On a Thursday night well after the sun has gone down and the rest of the village is quiet, Bucky sits on his sleep mat with his back against the wall and Steve bounces in his lap, head thrown back and lips parted in pleasure, sweat dripping down his chest, skin flushed and warm. Bucky holds him steady, as best he can with one arm wrapped around him and his palm pressed to the small of Steve’s back.  
  
“You feel so good,” Steve breathes, and Bucky moans low in his throat as Steve’s body squeezes around his cock, vice-tight and warm and slippery.  
  
“You too,” Bucky answers. Steve is gorgeous like this, muscles on display, rippling as he moves like a private show just for Bucky. Trusting him, loving him, all those fragile things Bucky is still struggling to believe he deserves after what he’s done, that Steve gives to him so freely, without hesitation. He reaches up as Steve looks down at him, lovingly brushing damp blond strands out of his eyes and tucking them behind Steve’s ear. Steve smiles at him, as bright as sunshine in the dark room.  
  
After they’ve come, Steve painting a mess onto Bucky’s chest with his release, and Steve is curled up against him, Bucky kisses his forehead and trails his fingers through Steve’s hair, keeping him close. Steve shifts, snuggling in closer despite the heat, nuzzling under Bucky’s chin. Bucky wishes he had two arms to cuddle him with. It doesn’t seem adequate with just one. Steve deserves to be held tighter, safer, and Bucky can’t manage it as well anymore.  
  
Like he can hear what Bucky’s thinking, Steve slides his hand up Bucky’s chest and brushes his fingers over the scarring, sliding them across the empty metal socket where it’s fused to his skin.  
  
“Do you …” Bucky begins, but the words die in his throat.  
  
“Go on,” Steve urges, gently.  
  
Bucky clears his throat and tries again. “Do you ever wish I wore it? The prosthetic Shuri made?”  
  
Steve shakes his head. His fingers stay travelling over Bucky’s scars.  
  
“It’s not like the old one. It doesn’t have enhanced strength or anything, so I couldn’t hurt anyone. I could … wear it, sometimes, if you want.”  
  
Steve moves in somehow closer, and his lips are soft and moist along Bucky’s throat as he murmurs, “wear it if _you_ want to. Not for me. You’re perfect already.”  
  
Bucky breathes out slowly, and doesn’t argue because Steve wouldn’t hear it if he did.  
  
“Nothin’ in this world I’ve ever loved as much as you. Never will be, either,” Steve continues, in a soft, dreamy voice as his fingers keep exploring. He gets introspective, sometimes, after good sex. He always has. Bucky can’t say he dislikes it.  
  
He turns his nose into Steve’s hair and inhales deeply, sweat and salt and the smell of them together.  
  
When he’s called to leave, as he always is sooner or later, Steve exits the hut to take the call and comes back with a funny look on his face. Bucky asks, but Steve says he doesn’t need to worry about it. That’s unusual. He doesn’t typically volunteer information about their covert missions unless Bucky asks, but when Bucky does ask, Steve doesn’t keep things from him. This time, he tersely says he can’t talk about it, kisses Bucky soundly, apologizes and promises to be back as soon as he can, and runs off with a pained look on his face before Bucky’s managed to insert two words into the conversation.  
  
Bucky is left alone, and confused, and missing Steve already, and annoyed with himself for missing him so soon. Steve always visits when he can and goes when he has to, that’s been their arrangement for months now. Bucky is generally okay with it, even if it means Steve can’t always be here when it would be helpful if he was. He wouldn’t want Steve giving up everything he fights for just to be here holding Bucky’s hand whenever he’s being particularly pathetic.  
  
This time, it’s harder than usual to watch him go.  
  
_“You’re really gonna live here all alone?” Bucky reasons. “You’re gonna sit at the kitchen table every day by yourself? Lookin’ at all these pictures on the walls?”_  
  
_Steve shrugs. “It’s my home.”_  
  
_Bucky looks around the small kitchen, and she’s everywhere. In the flowery pictures hung on the walls, in the frilly towel hanging from the handle on the oven, in the teacup in the sink that still has her lipstick stain on it. She was in the hospital for days, before she passed. Steve must have looked at that cup dozens of times and just not had the heart to wipe it clean. The thought leaves a painful throb in Bucky’s chest, that could be his heart really breaking. Bucky loves him. He hasn’t ever said it, yet, or anything close to it. Too terrified of how Steve will react, too terrified it could ruin them and he’d lose the one person he cares about the most._  
  
_“No, it isn’t,” he argues, kindly. “A home isn’t a place, Stevie. It’s wherever the people who love you are. And this place isn’t that, anymore.”_  
  
_Steve sniffs. He probably can’t imagine being here without her. Having to walk by her bedroom door every day on his way to the kitchen. Standing in front of the stove where she used to hum while stirring soup. Sitting at the table across from no one. Staring at the armchair where she used to knit in the evenings by the light of the streetlamps to save on electricity. The mat by the front door where she’d kiss Steve’s cheek goodbye every morning, even in the last few years when he was too old for it. But maybe he can’t really imagine being anywhere else, either._  
  
_“She’s still here,” Steve says. He sits at the table, leans over and rests his head in his hands. His suit from the funeral gives him an oddly formal appearance, when Bucky’s used to him in slacks and wrinkled shirts. The windbreaker he’d taken off at the door had been a hand-me-down from Bucky; a little too big on Steve but Bucky can’t deny he likes how Steve looks in his old clothes. “I don’t mean … I know she’s gone, but she isn’t. All her stuff is here, all my memories. She’s still connected to this place.”_  
  
_Bucky comes over and puts his hands on Steve’s shoulders again, like he had on the stairs only minutes ago when Steve had turned down his offer. “She’s connected to you. She’ll go with you, wherever you are.”_  
  
_“Your folks don’t need another mouth to feed,” Steve argues weakly._  
  
_Bucky kneels in front of him, squeezing Steve’s thighs in his hands and then reaching up to brush away a stray tear Steve couldn’t quite hold back. Steve looks down at him, misery swimming in his eyes. Bucky digs deep and summons the courage to tell him, “that wasn’t what I was talking about. I meant we should get our own place. Just you and me. My old man could lend us some money.”_  
  
_“I’d just cramp your style.”_  
  
_“Will you shut up?” Bucky jostles him. “You gotta know by now I’m not takin’ no for an answer. I’m not letting you stay here all alone. What kind of a friend would I be if I did?”_  
  
_“You’re the best friend, Buck.”_  
  
_“Let me act like it, then. Stubborn ass,” Bucky adds affectionately._  
  
_It’s too much for Steve, on top of everything else that he’s been through today. He crumbles a little, tears spilling over his cheeks that he tries to hide but Bucky doesn’t let him. Bucky pulls him into a tight hug, and Steve cries into his chest while Bucky rocks him._  
  
_“I got you,” Bucky promises, vows whispered into Steve’s hair. “You can try to fight it for your pride if you want but it’s pointless, you’re not getting rid of me.”_  
  
_Steve nods, and clings to him. “You really wanna get a place together?”_  
  
_“Sure, why not? We couldn’t afford much, but. We’d get by.”_  
  
Bucky finds himself on the ground, with no memory of how he got there. He doesn’t bother getting up for a long time.  
  
* * *  
  
  
“Where are we headed?” Steve asks, the second he boards the quinjet and finds Sam and Natasha waiting for him expectantly. The door is barely closed behind him before Sam is taxying it forward a few feet and then taking off into the air.  
  
“Istanbul, for now,” Natasha answers. “There’s an old safehouse we can use for a night or two while we figure out how to tackle this.”  
  
“You’re sure it’s Hydra?” It had been the worst news Steve could possibly get, right in the middle of a warm, pleasant morning with Bucky in the modest but cozy hut that’s become his home. Steve considers it his own home, as well, and hates to leave it so drastically. He especially hates leaving when Bucky had looked the way he did, disoriented and worried.  
  
“Have they ever been known for their subtlety?” she says dryly, by way of an answer. “I’ve been tracking online chatter for a few days. Yesterday an informant confirmed there’s suddenly activity at an abandoned Soviet base in Kazakhstan.”  
  
“Does the informant have a name?”  
  
“He does. But for the safety of his family, that’s confidential.” Natasha eyes him. “You’ll have to trust me.”  
  
Steve licks his lips, and nods. It’s easy to answer, “I do.”  
  
“Good. ‘Cause this one might be a hell of a mess, boys. Could really do with the rest of the Avengers right about now.”  
  
“I don’t know that any of them would help us, even if we did have some way to contact them,” Steve says, regretfully, and feeling all over again, like he consistently does, that it’s all his fault. The others would argue if he said as much, so he never does. He just feels it.  
  
“Clint might be convincible,” Natasha muses. “And Wanda. I’ll put some feelers out.”  
  
Steve pushes his hair back off his forehead and sits, still trying to process the abrupt change in plans. Natasha sits next to him.  
  
“How’s Barnes?” she asks.  
  
Steve doesn’t answer, because he isn’t sure what he would say if he did. She doesn’t repeat herself.  
  
* * *  
  
The safehouse is as bleak as Steve imagined it would be, but it’s on a quiet street near the edge of the city so as long as they’re careful, they likely won’t be detected.  
  
They couldn’t land the jet at a commercial airport, so they found a military airstrip and Natasha paid off the guards. She always seems to have money for bribery, and Steve would rather not find out where she keeps getting it. Sometimes, he thinks there’s no way international authorities aren’t aware of the three of them. They aren’t anywhere near as careful as they could be, and given they’re still in possession of a stolen quinjet, it really would be a miracle if they’d managed to remain completely undetected all this time. Steve keeps expecting the other shoe to drop for real, and to have to run for it and retire indefinitely to Wakanda or risk being sent back to the Raft. He’s not positive he would hate the first option. He’s also not positive he wants to put that burden on T’Challa, when the Wakandan King has already been generous enough in sheltering Bucky from the world. It would be asking too much, to request he take on three more international fugitives.  
  
The safehouse is in a plain concrete building. It’s a single bedroom and what Sam dryly calls an _open concept floorplan _which really just means the refrigerator, stove, table, couch, and grimy shower stall are all in the same room. Thankfully the toilet is behind a door, in what Steve can only describe as a closet. The beige paint is peeling off the drywall, and there are cigarette burns on the couch and a hole punched right through the wall into the bedroom.  
  
“I always wanted to get hepatitis off a toilet seat,” Sam comments, opening the unplugged refrigerator and stepping back to let a large brown rat scurry out and back through a small hole in the baseboard. His look is of utter disgust as he turns back toward Natasha. “Remind me again why we couldn’t do this in Wakanda? In one of those nice cushy rooms at the palace?”  
  
Natasha heaves both a sigh and her duffle bag onto the lone kitchen counter. “Because it’s Hydra.”  
  
“What does that mean?”  
  
“My informant is dead.”  
  
Sam’s eyes go wide. “What? Why didn’t you tell us that?”  
  
She ignores him, and regards Steve instead. “If they figure out Captain America is making regular trips to Wakanda, they might figure out that’s where their soldier is, and try to get him back.”  
  
She’s right, and the thought makes Steve’s stomach churn. “Shit,” he mutters, leaning back against the wall and rubbing tired hands over his face.  
  
“I’m sorry about your friend,” Sam says. He remains the most empathetic in their group. Sometimes Steve worries he and Natasha have forgotten how to fully be human.  
  
Natasha looks at him and nods, and a flicker of sadness crosses her face before she steels it away. To Steve, she says, “we won’t be here long. A couple days, at most. Keep monitoring the chatter, see if I can drum up further intel from other allies.”  
  
“Are they in danger?”  
  
“Everyone who knows anything is in danger, when it’s Hydra,” she answers, and Steve would already have known that if he’d given it any thought.  
  
They’re silent, for a few moments. Then Sam says, “I’ll take the couch, you two can share the bed.”  
  
Nobody argues.  
  
Natasha sets up her limited equipment at the small table. Sam unpacks the meager amount of food they brought with them. Steve sits and watches them work, feeling useless, and thinking of Bucky, back in his hut, unaware that he might be in danger because Steve didn’t tell him about it, before he took off. He’d thought it was for the best, at the time. Now he’s not so sure.  
  
In the night, Natasha tosses in her sleep, next to Steve on the double bed. When she rolls over onto her back and he can tell she’s awake, he lets his arm fall down in between them and takes her hand, squeezing it gently.  
  
“I miss them,” she says, softly, safe in the darkness to admit things she never would in daylight.  
  
“Me too,” Steve says, not needing her to clarify who she’s talking about.  
  
* * *  
  
  
She monitors the chatrooms for two days, compiling information into something like a dossier, like they would have used back at SHIELD before embarking on an official mission. Like she thought, there are more reports of activity at the Soviet base, and she begins to recognize code words in the chatter. She compiles them as well, and attempts to hypothesize what they might mean. Sam helps with that, after she asks. He’s surprisingly good at it.  
  
On their third morning in this sweaty concrete shithole, Natasha makes terribly burnt coffee in the ancient urn and sets three mugs on the table before she sits with Steve and Sam. Two faces greet her – one dark-skinned and one light but both with the same stilted expression. Steve seems to recognize the look on Natasha’s face before she even speaks, and it annoys her that he can read her so well. Sometimes. Sometimes, when she manages to shake her training for a moment, it’s a bit nice, to have a friend who knows her well. She hasn’t had that since Clint, and he’s potentially not in the picture anymore. But other times, she remembers she should be able to arrange her facial features to portray any emotion she wants and it’s irritating that Steve sees through her.  
  
“I have an idea,” she begins, cautiously. “That neither of you are going to like.”  
  
Sam doesn’t look up from the pair of boots he’s re-lacing. “Then it’s probably a bad one.”  
  
Natasha rolls her eyes and leans back in her chair, crossing her arms petulantly. “You wanna hear it before you make stupid comments?”  
  
“Fine, go ahead.”  
  
She fixes him with a mean look, and then turns to Steve and carefully says, “we’re outmatched on this one. This is big, and all we’ve got is the three of us.”  
  
“And?”  
  
“I think we should bring in Barnes.”  
  
Steve doesn’t instantly react. He just blinks.  
  
“Barnes as in _his _Barnes?” Sam asks incredulously.  
  
Natasha rolls her eyes. “No, this guy I met the other week, didn’t I mention? He has a special Hydra-seeking laser beam mounted to his head.”  
  
“No,” Steve says, snapping them out of their bickering before it can really begin.  
  
“Steve,” Natasha begins, quiet and imploring, the voice she uses when she’s about to turn on the fake feminine charm to make someone do what she wants.  
  
“No!” Steve repeats, louder.  
  
She huffs in frustration. She should have predicted this, and she did, really, but it’s still annoying. “Will you at least hear me out?”  
  
“It wouldn’t make a difference. The answer’s still gonna be no.”  
  
“He is _highly_ trained in hand to hand combat,” Natasha says, rattling off a list and counting the points on her fingers, “he can pilot multiple aircrafts, he’s a better long-range marksman than any of us, _and_ the Princess could make him a new Vibranium arm. Explain to me how any of that wouldn’t be an asset to our mission.”  
  
“_He_ is not an asset to our mission, that’s how,” Steve answers, puffing himself up, righteous and indignant as is way too often his M.O. “He isn’t a gun that we can just rent for a few weeks and then return and get our deposit back. He’s a human being.”  
  
“And the three of us aren’t?”  
  
“He’s out, Nat. He doesn’t want to fight anymore. After everything he’s been through don’t you think he deserves to make that choice?”  
  
“Don’t you think he’d _want_ to be in on this?” she tries. “If anyone has a score to settle with Hydra it’s him. Why don’t we let him decide?”  
  
Steve squeezes his hands into fists. It takes a lot to make him really angry, but Bucky is a weak spot and she knows that. He stands up, and paces a few steps away, shoulders clenching, trying to control his temper. “I’m not letting you manipulate him into –”  
  
“I’m manipulating him by thinking he’s a grown man who can make his own decisions?” Natasha stands up as well, the two of them squaring off over the table. “I don’t want the three of us to die on this mission because we’re outgunned, somehow that makes me the asshole?”  
  
“Do I get a say in this at all?” Sam asks.  
  
“No!” Steve and Natasha both snap at him in unison.  
  
Sam mutters something undecipherable under his breath, and picks up his coffee mug.  
  
“Three days ago you were telling me we have to stay in this dump because we can’t lead Hydra to him in Wakanda,” Steve points out. “Now you’re saying we should bring him into the fight? Offer him up to them on a plate?”  
  
“They’re already looking for him, Steve, you know that’s true! He was _their _asset, they can’t be happy he got away!” she returns.  
  
“Wakanda is the safest place in the world! The whole point of him being there is that no one could get him!”  
  
“T’Challa let him take refuge there as a way of thanking _you _for catching the man who killed his father.” Natasha lowers her voice, realizing through her frustration that yelling doesn’t help. She tries to appeal to Steve’s reasonable side. The problem is, she’s not sure he has a reasonable side when it comes to Barnes. “How much are you willing to bet on their loyalties extending further than that? Are you _really _positive that if Hydra came knocking, they wouldn’t give him up to protect their own people? I honestly think he’s safer with us.”  
  
“What about Lagos?” Sam’s asks.  
  
“What about it?” Natasha frowns at him.  
  
“He’s right.” Steve sighs, holding eye contact with Sam, who looks back with an apologetic head-tilt. “Brock Rumlow mentioned Bucky and I was compromised. And he wasn’t even there. People died, Nat, because his name came up and it made me sloppy. What happens when he’s actually in the field with us?”  
  
“You’re saying you can’t handle it?” she challenges, knowing that might be a sore spot. Not very nice, but a tactical move. He doesn’t take the bait.  
  
“I’m saying it’s a stupid risk.”  
  
“Well I don’t know who else to bring in!” She says it loudly, eyes wild, and then feels herself crumble a little inside.  
  
Again, annoyingly, Steve sees it. “What is it?” he asks.  
  
She sits back down, clenching her jaw to keep traitorous emotions at bay. “Clint won’t return my calls.”  
  
She sees Steve move slightly, but doesn’t look up at him.  
  
“I don’t know how to get in touch with Wanda,” she continues. It all builds up in the back of her throat, but she swallows it down expertly. Her training wasn’t good for nothing. “Tony hates your guts, and Sam’s. Thor is on Asgard, I don’t even know where Bruce is, if he’s even still alive. We’re short on weapons. We don’t have SHIELD backing us up. I get that this isn’t ideal, but I don’t know what else to do. It’s Hydra, Steve. If we go into this half-cocked and mess it up, people will die. Barnes isn’t my first choice, but he might be our only choice.”  
  
“I can’t …” Steve exhales slowly, and shuts his eyes for a moment. She can see the war raging inside his head, can tell how conflicted he is by the tightness in his shoulders and the muscle working in his jaw. “Nat, I just can’t, okay? I can’t put him in danger.”  
  
Natasha narrows her eyes, not angry anymore, but trying to see deeper into his reaction. Into the things it means, into what she might be able to discern from his body language, beyond his words. She knows him, too. Better than he knows her, because Steve wears his emotions much more on his skin-tight sleeves. “How many people do you need to save to make up for not saving him?”  
  
“I don’t know what you mean,” Steve responds defiantly, but of course he’s lying.  
  
“Yes you do. None of us do this for fun. Every single one of us, with the Avengers, we were all trying to atone for something. Stark’s weapons were used against civilians in wars. Thor wanted to make up for the destruction Loki caused. Sam lost his partner. You know my list of crimes. Barnes is your reason. You’re obsessed with saving people, because you couldn’t save him. You’re dreaming if you think it isn’t obvious.”  
  
“What’s your point?”  
  
“What I asked. Is there a number? A quota you could hit where you’re officially redeemed and you can forgive yourself, and stop bubble-wrapping him? And accept some help for once in your damn life?”  
  
“If your point is that I should forgive myself …”  
  
“Of course that’s my point.”  
  
“Do you forgive yourself?”  
  
Natasha swallows, and her chin juts out, stubbornly. There aren’t many things in her life she can be proud of, but switching sides, turning herself around and using all her training from the Red Room for good instead of evil, is one of them. “I don’t look at it the way you do. It’s one in, one out, for me. As long as I repay my debts and save more people than I hurt, my books are balanced. And maybe that’s not the healthiest way to cope, but it’s better than destroying myself trying to save the entire world all on my own. To make up for letting one guy fall, especially when that guy isn’t even dead.”  
  
“That isn’t fair.”  
  
“I didn’t say it was fair.”  
  
Steve looks at her, and at Sam, and then back. Anger swells visibly back up in his chest, and he curls his hands into fists. “I need some air,” he mutters, irrational and emotional like he always has been. He turns before either of them can protest and doesn’t resist dramatically slamming the apartment door behind him.  
  
“Off to a great start,” Sam mutters. He goes back to his boot.  
  
Natasha stares down into her coffee cup, where the dark liquid is probably cold by now. She gets up, pouring it out into the rusted sink, and heads for the bedroom. Maybe Steve can now be added to the list of people she used to consider family who want nothing to do with her. And maybe if he is, it doesn’t matter anymore what he thinks of her decisions.  
  
* * *  
  
  
Steve jogs, to clear his head. He gets a little lost in the unfamiliar winding streets, with towering windows on each side, and has to ask for a map at a gas station to find his way back after an hour struggling to retrace his steps. As he’s nearing the building where their safehouse is, the phone in his pocket buzzes. He pauses on the sidewalk, and checks it. It’s from Bucky, and Steve’s heart stops for a moment as he reads it.  
  
_Why didn’t you tell me about Hydra?_  
  
He has to read it three times, just to make sure he isn’t hallucinating. To make sure his emotions aren’t getting the best of him and making him see things that aren’t real. But it is real. And Steve feels like he could burst into flames or explode into a million pieces.  
  
He sprints the remaining blocks back to the apartment, taking the stairs three at a time and bursting in through the door. Sam is still at the table, with papers spread out in front of him, and he leaps up and reaches for his gun before he realizes it’s Steve and swears. Steve’s eyes find Natasha, sitting on the couch with her legs crossed. She didn’t so much as flinch as he came in, and doesn’t look at him now.  
  
“Are you kidding me?” he asks her.  
  
“What?” Sam asks warily, looking between them again. “What happened?”  
  
Steve shuts the door behind himself so hard the walls shake. He can barely recall the last time he was this angry. “I can’t _believe _you told him without talking to me first.”  
  
“Wait, you called Barnes?” Sam asks, rounding on Natasha.  
  
“I _did _talk to you,” she says to Steve, standing up and crossing her arms. The fire in her eyes would have matched her old hair. “You didn’t listen.”  
  
“That doesn’t give you the right –”  
  
“He is not your pet!” Natasha interrupts furiously. “Or your kid! I don’t have to ask your _permission _to speak to him! I don’t have to ask your permission to do fucking anything. You’re not my boss anymore, Rogers. In fact, you never were. You were just Fury’s favorite toy, so we all put up with you acting like you were in charge.”  
  
The accusation burns in his chest. He’s fought alongside so many different people, both during the war and after he was defrosted, and had varying degrees of relationships with them. Some were more like colleagues or teammates, but he thought what he had with Natasha went way further than that. Tightly, he says, “I never said I was your boss. I thought I was your friend.”  
  
“You didn’t even tell him. The people who tortured him for 70 years are back in action and you didn’t even think that was information he might like to know! Get off your throne. You are manipulating him for your own benefit just as much as you’re accusing me of doing.”  
  
“What I do or don’t tell him is none of your damn business!”  
  
“He wants to come along,” Natasha says, icily, taking a step forward and pointing aggressively at him. “Exactly like I thought he would. He wants to help us stop Hydra from hurting someone else the way they hurt him. What kind of friend are you to _him _if you’d deny him that?”  
  
“What is wrong with you?” Steve nearly shouts. He can’t wrap his head around this, can’t fathom why she’s doing this when she knows the extent of what Bucky’s been through and how much Steve would give his life to keep Bucky safe. “We’ve lost everything, all we have left is each other and you’re willing to destroy that just to prove that you’re right? Did they condition this into you in Russia? Teach you to take a wrecking ball to everything when people get too close to you?”  
  
“Everybody just calm down,” Sam says, getting in between them and holding both hands up like he’s trying to pacify two raging bulls. Steve thinks it isn’t far off the mark. “Steve, just …”  
  
“Just what?” Steve snaps.  
  
Sam exhales noisily, and speaks slowly. “You’re right to be pissed. But it’s done, now. So can we just stop screaming at each other and figure this out?”  
  
Steve’s chest heaves as he breaths, heart thundering behind his ribcage. He can’t look at her anymore. She’s been selfish before but he really thought they were past all that. He moves toward the bedroom, to get his things. “I have go, I have to talk to him about this.”  
  
“We’ll go with you,” Sam says.  
  
Steve laughs humorlessly and tosses his hands into the air. “You heard her, before she stopped caring about his safety once she decided Bucky could be useful. We can’t fly the jet in anymore, it’s too suspicious.”  
  
“So we’ll land it outside the border somewhere, and walk in,” Sam implores. He takes Steve by the shoulders, making Steve look into his kind brown eyes. “Cap, listen to me. With or without Barnes, we’re screwed on this mission before it even starts if the three of us are at each other’s throats. We gotta fix this, and that means us going with you to talk to Bucky.”  
  
Steve catches Natasha in his line of vision beyond Sam’s shoulder. Her expression is blank. No longer mad, but certainly not as ashamed as she should be. “Fine,” he mutters. “Do whatever you want.”  
  
* * *  
  
“I should’ve told you,” Steve says. He’s sitting next to Bucky on his sleep mat, while Bucky picks at a thread along the bottom of his shirt.  
  
It took them a day and a half to get back to Wakanda, landing the quinjet like Sam suggested in the middle of the desert miles away and hiking in. Still no guarantee they won’t be detected if Hydra is surveilling the airspace, but there’s never any guarantee of anything anymore. Sam and Natasha are back at the palace, meeting with Shuri this afternoon. T’Challa, as if he hadn’t already given them enough, offered to loan them a better aircraft, a bigger one with a kitchen and bedrooms and advanced medical facilities. One that has cloaking capabilities so they can fly it invisibly, and one on which they can stay in the air for weeks if necessary, without refueling. Shuri had offered them all Vibranium suits, and new weapons.  
  
“Can I ask you something?” Bucky’s voice is quiet, measured. He hasn’t touched Steve, since he arrived hours ago. Bucky always, always pulls Steve into the tightest, warmest hug the second he arrives to visit. This is the first time he hasn’t. Steve is more angry with himself, now, than with Natasha. She still shouldn’t have gone behind his back, but he isn’t innocent, either.  
  
“Of course. Always.”  
  
“Do you know things about me? Things you haven’t told me about?”  
  
Steve frowns. “What things, what do you mean?”  
  
“About the stuff I did when I was … your guys have intel, dossiers. Your Avengers, or SHIELD, or whoever it is. Do you know things about what I did that you haven’t told me?”  
  
“Buck.”  
  
Bucky looks up at him, with shiny eyes underneath a determined frown twisting his tanned forehead. “I deserve to know.”  
  
Tentatively, unsure if he’ll be allowed, Steve reaches out to brush some stray hairs back off Bucky’s cheek. Bucky lets him, but doesn’t let him change the subject.  
  
“I’m still trying to piece everything together, and I still don’t remember everything. If you know things that I don’t, things I did, I deserve to know them.”  
  
“Most of what I know is the stuff you’ve told me. You’re not wrong, I’m sure SHIELD had a file on you. But I never saw it. I never wanted to.”  
  
“Why not? You didn’t want to find out what you were dealing with before you dropped your shield and trusted that I wouldn’t kill you?”  
  
“Because it doesn’t matter to me.” Steve takes another chance, and brushes his fingers over Bucky’s beard. “What you did, what they _made_ you do … you can’t go back and undo it, but it has nothing to do with who you are now. And it was never, ever your fault.”  
  
“Then why didn’t you tell me?”  
  
Steve heaves a sigh, and wishes he had a better answer. “Because I didn’t want you to know. You’re still recovering, I thought learning Hydra is still out there might be hard for you to hear.”  
  
“Of course they’re still out there,” Bucky says, shaking his head like Steve was stupid to think otherwise. “Steve, it’s been two years, five months, and eleven days since I remembered you and escaped from them. Hydra is a global organization. They’ve existed for decades. The faction that did this to me was just one piece of it. I was on the run from them for two years before you found me, aware the whole time they could show up at any minute and take me back. Killing Alexander Pierce doesn’t mean … well. Cut off the head, right? That’s their whole thing. Cut off one head, and three more grow. I knew they were still out there. I knew they’d resurface, at some point.”  
  
“Doesn’t mean you should be the one to deal with it. Not after everything they did to you.”  
  
Bucky looks at him for a moment. His own hand comes up, fingers brushing for just a few seconds through Steve’s beard, and then they fall away and he stands, walking a few steps away.  
  
“You think I’m too broken to do this,” he surmises. It isn’t a question.  
  
Steve’s stomach drops. “No,” he mumbles, but it’s feeble, because that’s exactly what it sounded like he meant, even if it wasn’t. And he’s not so positive it wasn’t.  
  
“Yeah, you do.” When he looks back, his expression is nothing short of devastated, and Steve’s stomach falls another few feet.  
  
“I didn’t say that,” he croaks.  
  
“You didn’t have to.”  
  
“Buck.”  
  
Bucky turns away from him, pushing his hand over his hair to wipe more wisps of it off his damp forehead. His voice is quiet as he says, “I think you should go back to the city. Ask T’Challa for a room at the palace, with your friends.”  
  
Steve wants to argue. He aches for it, aches to get up and pull Bucky into his arms and say he’s sorry, and whatever he did wrong he’ll fix it, and _please don’t send me away_. He doesn’t do any of that. He swallows his hurt, over the lump rising in his throat, and stands. He picks his backpack up off the ground and slings it over his shoulder, walking past Bucky and out of the hut without another word. He only makes it fifteen steps.  
  
“Steve,” Bucky’s voice rings out, from behind him. Steve stops, but doesn’t turn until Bucky adds, “I didn’t mean that.”  
  
He’s leaning against the outside wall of his hut, next to the doorway, arm crossed over his middle. He’s looking down at the ground between their feet.  
  
When Steve doesn’t immediately answer, Bucky begs, “stay, please?”  
  
The softness, the vulnerability in his voice, the waver that betrays he’s expecting Steve to turn him down, shatters the last remaining pieces of Steve’s heart. He runs back and crashes into him, throws his arms around Bucky’s back, holding tightly. They stumble unsteadily back inside. Steve drops his bag, and Bucky reaches for him, and they end up back on the floor, Steve leaned against a wall and Bucky half in his lap, folded securely in his arms. Terrified that if he lets go, Bucky might vanish before him.   
  
“I just don’t want you getting hurt.”  
  
“I don’t want you getting hurt either, but you risk it every time you leave this place.” Bucky rubs his nose along the column of Steve’s neck. “It’s not fair for me to ask you not to, and it’s not fair for you to ask that either.”  
  
“I don’t want you to feel like you have to do this, either, to make up for what Hydra made you do. You don’t have to save as many people as you hurt to balance your books.” He hears Natasha’s words from days ago echoing in his mind, silently calling him a hypocrite.  
  
Bucky exhales slowly. He tucks his head further under Steve’s chin, wrapped up and safe, at least for the moment. He replies, and there’s no way he could know he’s repeating, almost verbatim, the other thing she said that day. “How many people do you need to save to make up for not being able to save me?”  
  
Steve exhales heavily, and closes his eyes against the sting of tears. “That’s what Nat said.”  
  
“I don’t want to be a weapon anymore. That’s different than this, Steve. Fighting to save people, to help people, it’s different. Most of the stuff Hydra put in me is still there, the training, the skills … I just want to find a way to use it for good. I can’t get rid of it, not completely, so maybe … maybe if I could do some good with it, use it to fight back, it wouldn’t feel so much like I’ve been poisoned.”  
  
“I understand that,” Steve says, kissing the top of Bucky’s head. “I really do.”  
  
“Hydra never gave me a choice. This is my choice.”  
  
Quietly – bravely, he thinks – Steve admits, “I’m so scared of losing you again.” Steve has lost him so many times. Too many, to bear another.  
  
“I’m scared of that, too.”  
  
“If you …” Steve clenches his molars and eyes shut, and buries his nose into Bucky’s hair. Inhales him, sweat and soap and that warm, mellow smell that’s always meant home to him, even when they were little kids and Bucky was pulling bullies off him on the playground before Steve could get himself too seriously hurt trying to take on a kid twice his size. “I can’t tell you what to do. I don’t _want_ to tell you what to do. You’ve had enough of that. If you need to do this, I won’t try to stop you.”  
  
“I need to do this,” Bucky confirms, apologetic, but resolute.  
  
Steve nods. “Okay.”  
  
* * *


	3. Preparation

The bustle of busy streets is so easy to get lost in. Not the kind of lost where he really doesn’t know how to return to where he started, but the kind where he feels swallowed up by his surroundings and for a few brief, relaxing minutes, almost feels as if he no longer exists. As if he’s floating above the earth watching mothers drag children along by their hands and vendors call out prices to passers-by and men laugh over coffee, and none of them can see him. He used to love the chaos of DC for that very reason, but in Wakanda, the feeling is even more complete, because there isn’t a person in sight who doesn’t look like Sam. There are only three white people in the entire country, and they’re all up at the palace right now. He blends seamlessly in, woven into the fabric of the city, until he becomes part of it.  
  
He was tired of the tension, in the suite at the palace where he and Natasha always stay when they accompany Steve to Wakanda, so he just left. Got up and put on his shoes and walked out. Neither Steve nor Natasha tried to stop him. He won’t stay away too long. He isn’t angry with either of them, but they’re still angry with each other and he gets tired sometimes of being everyone’s therapist. They’re grown adults, they’re capable of working out their own shit without Sam always having to be the intermediary.  
  
He approaches a stall where a pretty girl with long braids is selling warm drinks. She smiles at him, and speaks to him in their melodic language, that he loves listening to and wishes he understood.  
  
“English?” he asks, wincing, feeling disrespectful for even asking.  
  
Her eyebrows raise in surprise. “You are American?”  
  
He nods. “Here with Captain Rogers. And, uh … shit, what do you guys call Barnes. White Wolf.”  
  
“Ah.” The girls nods, and then tells him, “I speak English not well. I am learning.”  
  
“Nah, it’s perfect,” he says, waving a hand.  
  
“Thank you. What would you order?”  
  
“Coffee, with cream if you have it.”  
  
She grabs a paper cup and pours steaming coffee into it. She reaches for a glass bottle filled with milk, and then hesitates, and looks back at him. “Better, with milk from a coconut. If you want to try?”  
  
Sam shrugs. “Yeah! Sure, I trust you.”  
  
Another smile, and she reaches for a different bottle.  
  
When she hands it to him, he blows on the surface and then takes a sip, eyes closing briefly as he swallows it. “Damn, you’re right. That is better.”  
  
He pays her and thanks her, and then wanders back into the fray. Just a bit longer, he thinks, to be the good kind of lost, before he’ll make his way back to reality.  
  
* * *  
  
  
He sits on the marble tile, on the balcony outside the familiar suite. He pulls his feet up, wrapping his arms around his knees. Through the almost impossibly clear glass railing, he can see what seems like the whole city, glittering and colorful below in the early morning light. He just breathes, and watches, looking at nothing in particular but taking in everything. Months later he’s still impressed by the sight. He’s never seen anything as beautiful as this place. The vibrant way the city seems to buzz before him, even in the middle of the night. It has a pulse to it, the buildings and roadways almost seeming alive along with their human inhabitants.  
  
A few minutes, later, footsteps appear behind him, and Natasha’s feet stop next to Steve’s hip. She bends down and sits beside him on the floor, mirroring his position with her feet hitched up. She’s quiet for a moment. Sitting this close, Steve can smell her shampoo. It’s comforting because it, too, is familiar.  
  
“You were right,” she says eventually. They haven’t spoken much in the last few days. Steve hasn’t been intentionally ignoring her, because he isn’t really angry anymore, but there’s been an unspoken distance between them. “It wasn’t okay that I went to him behind your back.”  
  
“You remember Peggy Carter?” Steve asks.  
  
“Of course.”  
  
“She told me once, a lifetime ago, that I should respect Bucky enough to let him make his own decisions.”  
  
“Good advice.”  
  
“I’ve always been shit at following it. Especially now.”  
  
“I don’t think it’s because you don’t respect him. I think it’s because you care about him.”  
  
“I love him,” Steve admits. He’s never said the words out loud to anyone other than Bucky. It’s a little terrifying, but at the same time it feels like freedom.  
  
“I know,” Natasha says softly. “I can see that.”  
  
“I’m sorry for some of the things I said,” Steve tells her. “You didn’t deserve them.”  
  
“I’m sorry for telling him without asking you.”  
  
“You wouldn’t have had to, if I’d … you should’ve seen the look on his face.” Steve closes his eyes, and blinks furiously a few times when he opens them again. “Like I’d really betrayed him.”  
  
“I’m sure he doesn’t think that.” When Steve doesn’t answer, she continues, “I guess now I know why you resisted all the times I tried to set you up, over the years.”  
  
“I thought he was dead when you started doing that.”  
  
“You were clearly still hung up on him. Even though you thought you’d never see him again.”  
  
Steve sighs. He’s not sure he had any idea that was the case, back then. He couldn’t stomach the idea of going on a 21st century date, with all it’s foreign customs and implications that he was sure he’d mess up, without ever giving much thought as to why he felt that way. But she’s likely right. “Sort of a shitty existence.”  
  
“I could tell, you know? Even if I didn’t understand the reason. I could just tell you were unhappy. Lonely.”  
  
“I guess at least I wasn’t conscious for most of the time since I thought he died. He was.”  
  
“He didn’t know who he was. I’m not saying his life was good, but it’s not quite like he spent every minute of all those decades missing you.”  
  
“He thinks he remembered me before.”  
  
“Before what?”  
  
“Before this last time.” Steve sniffs, and wipes his nose with the heel of his palm. “He isn’t sure but … something he said to me, the first week he was awake. That he remembers them saying he was harder to control than the others. He thinks maybe it was because he kept remembering me.”  
  
“I don’t know if that’s heartbreaking or so sweet I’m nauseas. Why did they keep using him if he was a problem?”  
  
Steve shrugs, and doesn’t know the real answer. His best guess is something he’d rather not think about if he had the ability to shut his brain off. “Maybe he was more successful than the others. Maybe he was the best one.”  
  
Pressing her lips together, and looking sincerely sorry about it, Natasha says, “what a horrifying thought.”  
  
The glands in the back of his throat tighten like tasting something sour, and Steve clenches his molars together for a minute before he can bring himself to speak without breaking down. “It … when I think about what happened to him, Nat.”  
  
“It’s awful,” she agrees. “I’m glad he has you.”   
  
  
“I wish he hadn’t run, after DC. I could have helped him so much sooner.”  
  
“He would have been arrested if he hadn’t run. He would have been thrown into some high security prison for the rest of his life with terrorists and serial killers. Or worse, Hydra would have found him.”  
  
“I know. I just hate the idea of him out there all alone for almost two years. Confused and scared and dealing with all the shit Hydra put in his head. I hated it while we were looking for him, too. Used to keep me up at night.”  
  
“You saved him, Steve.”  
  
Steve shrugs. “Not really.”  
  
“You did. You brought him in. He trusted you when he couldn’t trust anyone else. And you’ve kept him safe.”  
  
“Wakanda kept him safe. I didn’t have much to do with that. If T’Challa hadn’t offered him a place to stay I don’t know what we would have done.”  
  
“I do.”  
  
Steve looks up at her. “You do what?”  
  
“I know what you would have done.”  
  
“Oh yeah?” Steve manages a small smile. “And what’s that?”  
  
“You’d have gone on the run with him. You would have moved to a remote island somewhere or some tiny fishing village in Iceland. Gone off the grid.”  
  
Steve presses his lips together to suppress another smile. He isn’t going to make a thing of it, but it warms something inside him to know that she knows him better than he thought she did. “Yeah. You’re probably right.”  
  
“I don’t hate that for the two of you.” She stretches her legs out in front of her and leans back on her hands. “Living in some rustic cabin, working on a fishing boat. Trying to see who can grow a more hideous beard.”  
  
Steve laughs.  
  
“I promise we’ll keep him safe,” Natasha says, reaching over briefly to rub his elbow.  
  
“You can’t promise that.”  
  
“No, I can’t,” she concedes, and rewords it. “I promise we’ll do everything in our power to keep him safe. I promise I’ll have his back, like I have yours. Sam will too.”  
  
“I know,” Steve says, and he does. In spite of everything, he does believe that.  
  
She leans over, resting her head on his shoulder. He rests his temple against her hair, and looks out over the sparkle of the city.  
  
* * *  
  
  
Shuri holds out a foot-long steel bar. “Squeeze this.”  
  
Bucky takes it in his new Vibranium hand and clenches his fingers. The bar bends instantly; the squeal of metal-on-metal ringing out as he crushes it easily into two pieces as if it were made of Styrofoam. The bottom piece falls to the floor with a loud clatter.  
  
She smiles, self-satisfied. “Good. How does it feel?”  
  
Bucky rolls his shoulder and moves the wrist up and down, testing it. He’s become used to having no arm on his left side over the last few months, getting slowly accustomed to the absence of weight and the way Hydra’s used to tug uncomfortably at his muscles, getting better every day at tasks that were initially tricky one-handed. “Better than the last one. I don’t notice it as much.”  
  
“Your last arm was built in the 1940s, so to be honest that isn’t quite a compliment.”  
  
Bucky laughs, and restates. “Miles better. Indescribably better. You’re a genius.”  
  
“Now we’re getting somewhere.” She grins and touches the arm, moving her fingers over it as if examining it to make sure it’s prepared for use in combat. “I have equipped it with features the last one would not have had. It’s lighter, and much more resilient. Breaking it would take considerably more force. And it’s designed for maximum respondence to your brain’s commands. It functions as closely to a real limb as is possible. You might even think you can feel with it, at times. You can’t, of course, but it’s interconnected to your nervous system in a way that might trick your brain into thinking it’s capable of sensation. Likely not while you’re in battle. Your mind will be too preoccupied with other things in a situation like that. But perhaps in quieter moments.”  
  
Bucky doesn’t voice it out loud, but something inside him dances joyfully at even the potential he could hold Steve’s hand and feel it. Still, he worries, because that seems to have become his permanent state. He was so carefree, before the war, even though they had plenty of things to worry about. He never took them as seriously as he should have. Always assumed they’d land easily on their feet. Now, he always assumes he’ll fall.  
  
“You can also remove it.” Shuri shows him a small sensor and a latch just under his armpit. “Programmed to recognize only your fingerprints. No one will be able to take it off except you. Not even me.”  
  
“You don’t want a fail-safe, in case I go rogue and need to be put down?” Bucky asks. It’s a joke, and he says it sardonically, but at the same time it isn’t a joke at all. He worries about that, too. About the idea of being so powerful he could be used as a weapon again, if recaptured, and Steve wouldn’t be able to take him out.  
  
“We trust you,” she answers, simply. As if it’s all very simple.  
  
“You think I’m ready for this?”   
  
It isn’t fair, to put that on her, but she knows him now. Over the last few months, he’s _let_ her know him, in a way that almost no one does. It was a struggle, at first. He’s always been private, now more than ever, and the only other living soul he trusts is Steve and even there it’s not as completely as it should be. It’s a struggle with Steve, too, to let himself be real and weak and trust that someone else will catch him if he falls. But his rehabilitation depended on it, with her.   
  
Shuri needed to know things, in order to help him fix them. Sometimes telling her even the smallest details felt like cutting his chest open and leaving his organs bare and exposed. He did it, because he had to see this right through to the end. He couldn’t live the way he used to anymore, running from his past and hiding from the world and trapped in the dark maze of his own mind. The result, as he sits here now, is that a teenage girl he’s only known a few months is the person who knows him maybe even better than Steve does. He’s told her things he’s never spoken out loud outside of this lab.  
  
She raises an eyebrow. “My tech doesn’t fail.”  
  
Bucky can’t help cracking a smile. “I know. Not what I meant.”  
  
Her responding smile is small, and tinged with regret. “I don’t think I can answer that for you.”  
  
He nods. “Yeah. Sorry, I shouldn’t have …”  
  
“I do know that Captain Rogers would understand if you decided you aren’t. You know that too, yes? He would still love you.”  
  
Bucky nods again, heaving a deep breath that shakes on the way out. Sitting here with Shuri is one of the few places he feels something close to comfortable discussing Steve in that way, and even still the twinge of anxiety rises in his chest. It shouldn’t. She’s young, and the world has changed so much since their life in Brooklyn, and she’s never so much as blinked an indication that she sees them any differently than anyone else. Still, what they have is fragile, and Bucky’s urge to safeguard it overrides logic sometimes. He’s too aware of how Hydra operates; too aware that any vulnerable spots are used against the people they seek to control, or destroy.  
  
“He didn’t want me with them in the first place. But I think I have to. For me, more than for him.”  
  
Shuri regards him for a moment, her dark eyes squinted like they do when she’s seeing things most people don’t. Then she hops up onto the table beside him. Her hand slips into his flesh one, so tiny clasped in his own, but she squeezes with strength that soothes him.  
  
“Then you are ready.”  
  
He squeezes back, and searches for adequate words to thank her, but comes up empty.  
  
“Can I tell you something?”  
  
“Sure.”  
  
“Before you were awake. In those weeks, when I was working in your head, to find the neurons connected to the trigger words.”  
  
“You’re about to tell me you can read minds, aren’t you?”  
  
“No.” She grins. “The human mind cannot be read like a book. But it can be felt. Things that are important stand out.”  
  
“What stood out?”  
  
“Two things were stronger than everything else.” Her other hand reaches out, wrapping both around his. “The first, was a man with blue eyes and a kind smile. I tried to get around him, to find the programming, but he wouldn’t let me. He was there, no matter what I did.”  
  
Bucky closes his eyes and squeezes them for a moment before he opens them again, blinking to steady himself. “Even in my head, Steve’s stubborn,” he jokes, to cover the surge of emotion in his chest.  
  
“The second was you, fighting. Stronger than I expected.”  
  
“Fighting against you?”  
  
“Fighting _with_ me.” She smiles at him again, brighter this time. “What they put into your mind, it tried to block me, tried to keep me from accessing the pathways. I was anticipating that. But you were there as well. The real you, underneath what they did to you. Fighting to come back, to help me erase the things they did to you. You are a good man, James Barnes. You have a good heart, and you may not believe it, but it’s still there inside you. It wants to be louder than all the other voices. You just need to let it.”  
  
He hates the way his jaw quivers, and clenching his teeth together doesn’t stop it, or the sting of tears in his eyes. He pulls his hand out of hers to scrub in annoyance at the wetness that spills down his cheeks, but she takes his hand back and doesn’t let him wipe it away.  
  
“It’s alright,” Shuri tells him, gently, in contrast to the rough way she’s gripping his hand.  
  
“Can you try the words again?” he forces out.  
  
“We’ve done it so many times.”  
  
“Please.” He isn’t above begging. Not when it matters so much to know for sure they don’t work anymore.  
  
“желаниe.”  
  
“No, strap me down first.”  
  
Shuri shakes her head, and keeps going, her hands still holding his, small and so easily breakable, and panic rises in Bucky’s throat, but she doesn’t stop. “Pжавый. Печь. Рассвет. Семнадцать.”  
  
“Shuri,” he pleads.  
  
“Доброкачественные. Девять. Возвращение домой. Один. грузовой вагон.”  
  
She stares at him as she finishes, eyes firmly locked to his, and it’s over before Bucky even realizes the lack of anything in his head. His muscles didn’t tense, his mind didn’t race, the training didn’t take over. It didn’t so much as whisper to him. Gone completely, as if it was never there in the first place, and he nearly collapses in relief, hands shaking and tears falling and breath drawing into his lungs in short gasps.  
  
“You are Bucky,” she reminds him. “No one can take that from you again.”  
  
He wraps his arms around her, one flesh and bone and the other Vibranium, and holds her tight to his chest, and feels badly about his tears falling into her hair. “Thank you. If I said it a thousand times a day for the rest of my life it still wouldn’t be enough.”  
  
“I don’t need thanks. I need you to be safe out there. Come back to us in one piece, I don’t have time to glue you back together again.”  
  
Bucky laughs despite the seriousness of the moment, and she does as well. “You would, though, right? If you needed to.”  
  
“Of course I would. But don’t test it. You tell that to Captain Rogers, tell him if he doesn’t keep you safe he’ll answer to me for it.”  
  
“I will.”  
  
“Good.” Shuri sits up, her face wet as well. “Now let me go. We can’t sit here all day being dramatic, I have work to do.”  
  
He does, and she slides off the table and points a finger at him.  
  
“You text me, every day, do you hear me? I don’t want 24 hours to pass without hearing from you.”  
  
“I promise.”  
  
“Good,” she says again. “Go save the world.”  
  
* * *  
  
  
A tentative knock at the door sounds like Bucky – because the only other people who’d be knocking are Shuri or one of the King’s guard and they’d do it a lot more forcefully – and Steve’s instincts are proven right as he opens it and finds him on the other side, diminutive in flowy blue robes, and two-armed once again. He steps back to let Bucky into the suite, both staring and trying not to stare at the new arm attached to his metal shoulder socket. This one is dark black with an almost purple shimmer to it, and luminescent gold in the grooves between the moving plates. And no red star on the shoulder. No Hydra branding. Wakandan Vibranium instead, magical and a force used for good in this world instead of bad.  
  
Bucky does see him staring, and regards Steve carefully with what can only be described as hopefulness shining cautiously in his eyes.  
  
Steve reaches one hand out slowly. “Can I …?”  
  
Bucky nods, taking steps closer and meeting Steve in the space between them. Steve takes his new hand, moves his fingers over it before sliding them up the forearm. The metal is warm under his touch, and somehow soft, even though it’s solid. Almost, _almost _like skin, if Steve ignores the harder lines that stripe along the surface.  
  
“How is it?” he asks, tearing his eyes away so he can look back at Bucky, who’s watching him carefully.  
  
“Lighter than the other one,” Bucky answers. He makes a loose fist around Steve’s wrist, not squeezing his grip but just circling his bones with Vibranium fingers. Then he lets go.  
  
“How does it feel?”  
  
“Lighter,” Bucky repeats.  
  
“No, not that,” Steve clarifies. He brings the hand up to his mouth, kissing the knuckles, and then drops it and circles his arms around Bucky’s waist. His chest unclenches in relief when Bucky’s arms go around his shoulders, returning the embrace. Steve taps a finger to the center of Bucky’s chest. “In here, I mean.”  
  
“Oh.” Bucky exhales. Long strands of hair fall into his eyes as his gaze shifts to the ground between their feet. “I guess … it wasn’t made by Nazis and stuck on me without my consent, so that’s … better.”  
  
“Your choice,” Steve says, echoing what Bucky had iterated the other day.  
  
“I hated the other one.”  
  
“I know.” Steve gathers a handful of the back Bucky’s robes, the soft material sliding between his fingers. “I’m happy it’s gone. But I wish we’d gotten the chance to be together a bit before it got smashed. We could have … I don’t know. Reclaimed it. Made it ours, instead of theirs.”  
  
Bucky looks up at him, and Steve gently brushes hair from in front of his eyes before wrapping his arm back around Bucky’s waist.  
  
“Still mad at me?”  
  
Bucky shakes his head. His flesh fingertips slide into the curls at the nape of Steve’s neck. “I know you were trying to protect me. In your bull-headed way.”  
  
Laughing a little at himself, Steve is soothed when Bucky smiles as well. “You spent two decades protecting me. Figured it’s about time I returned the favor.”  
  
“Sure.” Bucky smiles wider, and then leans down and rests his head on Steve’s shoulder. “I can do this, Steve.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
“Where’s Wilson and Romanov?”  
  
“Getting a tour of the airship we’ll take. Learning all its features and everything. Teaching Sam how to pilot it.”  
  
“You didn’t wanna go with them?”  
  
“Wanted to be here when you got back, from getting the arm.”  
  
Bucky huffs a little, like he wants to call Steve a sap, or protest being babied, but he does neither. Instead his lips brush against Steve’s neck, and Steve keeps him close and soaks him in.  
  
* * *  
  
  
As long as he lives, Sam doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to Wakanda. Passing through the barrier for the first time three months ago was like slipping into a dream. It’s like nothing he’s ever seen, nothing he’s ever imagined, even in his wildest daydreams as a kid with an over-active imagination. It still stuns him. The hanger he’s led into with Natasha at his side, by a particularly tall member of the Dora Milaje, is bigger than a football stadium. Or maybe two. The ceiling seems impossibly high and the number of jets and planes and aircrafts impossibly large, each one more impressive than the last. It’s saying something that after knowing Tony Stark for so many years, Sam still manages to be impressed by technology of any kind. But the stuff they have here makes Stark’s tech look like a grade school science project.  
  
Sam smirks to himself, imagining saying that to Stark’s smug face.  
  
“This is the craft our King has decided to lend for your mission,” the guard says, as they stop in front of a massive ship.  
  
Sam blinks up at it, once again not entirely convinced he isn’t back in his bed in DC and this hasn’t been one long, ridiculously detailed fever-dream. It’s the size of a yacht. He can’t fathom how something this massive could even fly, let alone stay in the air undetected for months at a time without needing to refuel. It’s dark black, glittering in the pot lights that shine down from the ceiling, and like everything else in this magical place, it almost seems to be breathing. Vibranium animates objects, giving them life that exudes from the structures.  
  
Natasha breathes out a low curse beside him, echoing Sam’s inner monologue perfectly in a single word.  
  
“Five bedrooms, each with en suite bathrooms,” the guard says, as she leads them up the ramp and into their new temporary home. Other than the suite at the palace, it’s by far the nicest temporary home Sam’s had since the mess at the airport in Germany. He doesn’t regret helping Steve, or picking his side. He’d do it again in an instant. But he misses his bed and his jogging route in DC and his big bathtub and his neighbor’s dog Daisy. He misses waking up in the morning and knowing exactly where he’s going to sleep that night. He misses going to movies and baseball games and living like a normal human.  
  
“A kitchen. Food supplies to last two months, extra in a chilled and vacuum-sealed chamber next to the refrigerator where it will not spoil,” she continues, showing them around as she narrates. Inside, it looks much less like something out of a science fiction movie and much more like a normal dwelling. It’s surprisingly homey, considering it’s a giant floating hovercraft. A big kitchen table with six chairs, expensive looking appliances like a silver espresso machine, white couches and chairs in the attached living area that look incredibly comfortable. “Internet, television, satellite communications. There is also a medical suite, although I suppose none of you are doctors.”  
  
“I’ve done some work as a field medic,” Sam tells her, not taking any offense to the way she sniffed derisively as she made the comment. He doesn’t mind their superior tone. They’re incredible, so God-damn right they should be superior. “Doesn’t make me a doctor, but I can handle minor stuff. Lacerations, simple breaks, that stuff.”  
  
She raises an eyebrow at him, but doesn’t engage. Instead she shows them the bottom floor where there are two smaller jets for when they need to leave the aircraft, like life-rafts on a ship, and patiently teaches him how to pilot it. The most important function, the craft’s ability to become invisible to both the naked eye and radar technology, is as easy as the flip of a switch. Sam wonders privately if maybe they should just steal it and never bring it back and live on it forever. It’ll be the safest he’s been in half a year.  
  
“This is fucking insane,” Natasha says to him, once the guard leaves them to explore further and acquaint themselves with their new lodgings.  
  
“Remind me again why we didn’t just move here permanently like Barnes?” Sam asks, blowing out a heavy breath as he looks around. He follows Natasha down a white, shiny hallway to the wing with the bedrooms. They’re bigger than his old room in DC. King-sized beds with plush pillows and blankets, big windows, dressers for their clothes, touch-pad platforms in the corners, attached bathrooms with marble tile and heated floors.  
  
“Barnes doesn’t exactly live like this. He sleeps on the ground and bathes in a river.” Natasha’s fingers hover over one of the touch-pads, exploring the apps and functions on it. “Damn, I can sit here and monitor online chatter in a bathrobe.”  
  
“You know what I mean.”  
  
“Is it a real question?”  
  
Sam sighs, and then chuckles. “Alright, no. But still. Our whole collective need to help people? To be noble and sacrificing and do the right thing? Sometimes it sucks. Being selfish sounds way better.”  
  
She nods, and keeps playing with the pad. “Sometimes, yeah, it does. How about after this one we take a vacation? Steve says there’s some nice beaches around here. If we take out a whole Hydra cell, we’ll deserve it.”  
  
“Hell yeah.”  
  
* * *  
  
  
Natasha and Sam are already inside the airship when he and Bucky arrive at the hanger. People buzz about, loading supplies onto the aircraft. Shuri tinkers away near a panel on the underside, making last-minute adjustments. Steve walks up to T’Challa, with a bag slung over his shoulder and Bucky following closely behind him, his new arm glinting in the early morning light.  
  
As has become a familiar pattern, Steve comes up short in a search for words to properly thank the man to whom he continually owes such an unpayable debt. “Thank you, again,” is the only think he can think of to say. As always, its woefully inadequate.  
  
“It is nothing,” T’Challa says, with a kind smile, taking the hand Steve extends.  
  
“It’s a lot more than nothing. I hope you’re not expecting me to ever pay you back for everything you’ve done, because it would be genuinely impossible.”  
  
T’Challa shakes his head. “There is no need. Recent events have taught me the importance of sharing our fortunes with those who have not been blessed in the ways that we are here. You do nothing but good in this world, Captain. You will always be welcome to our assistance.”  
  
Steve nods. He knows only a little, of what happened soon after Bucky arrived in Wakanda and was put back into cryostasis, from stories the villagers tell. Of a long-lost potential heir to the throne, and an expansive battle that ended in some regrettable deaths. He doesn’t ask for more details. Instead, he thanks T’Challa again and boards the ship.  
  
Since Sam and Natasha have already chosen bedrooms, Steve chooses the one right at the end of the hall, separated a little from the other four. He gives the one closest to it to Bucky, but assumes he’ll rarely be sleeping there. It’s for show. Sam doesn’t know about them. The guilt about that eats at Steve every day, but he’s never figured out how to bring it up. He still isn’t used to living in a world where they don’t have to hide, like they did in Brooklyn.  
  
In Steve’s room – as white as everything else; white walls, white blankets, white furniture, a wide window that will let in streams of glittering white sunlight once they’re in the air – he lifts the tattered duffel bag from off his shoulder and sets it onto the edge of the bed. Bucky hovers in the doorway, as if he’s unsure for a moment if he should go unpack in his own room.  
  
“Where’s all your stuff?” Bucky asks.  
  
Steve frowns over at him. “What stuff?”  
  
Bucky gestures toward the bed. “I thought you said this mission could take months. You have one bag.”  
  
“It’s more than you have,” Steve points out, glancing down at the canvas knapsack in Bucky’s hand.  
  
“Yeah, but it makes sense that I don’t own anything. I was Hydra property for 70 years and now I’m a fugitive.”  
  
“I prefer … prisoner of war, and political refugee.”  
  
Bucky sighs impatiently. “That’s not the point. _You _were alive in this century for years before I turned up. Where the hell’s all your crap? Didn’t you have a home?”  
  
Steve licks his lips, turns the question carefully over in his mind and struggles with how best to answer it. He walks over, closing the door behind Bucky after he moves further into the room and out of Steve’s way. Hesitantly, Steve says, “yeah, kinda. I had an apartment for a while. But I didn’t really have anything worth keeping.”  
  
Bucky’s eyes narrow, staring at Steve with unnerving intensity until a look of understanding dawns on his face. “You never went back, did you?”  
  
“Back where?”  
  
“Wherever you were living before you found me and everything went to shit. With – with your Avengers.”  
  
He’s right, but Steve doesn’t want to admit it because he knows what Bucky will do with that information.  
  
“After the fight with Stark,” Bucky continues. His expression is caught somewhere between accusatory and devastated. “We left that place and we went right to Wakanda. Then I went under, and you … you never went back home. That’s why you don’t have any stuff. Nobody gives up all their possessions and chooses to live out of a duffel bag.”  
  
“No. I didn’t go back,” Steve admits. “I went to the prison. Helped get everyone out. Helped get Scott back to his family, helped find Wanda and Vision a place to hide. And then I met up with Natasha and Sam, and we worked out a game plan going forward.”  
  
“You had a whole life before I turned up.”  
  
“Buck.” Steve unzips his bag, steeling himself for a conversation he really doesn’t want to have but can’t stop now that Bucky has the idea in his head.  
  
“Don’t lie to me. Me … they kept me in a warehouse. They woke me up and drilled a bunch of shit into my head when there was a job to be done and then when it was over they flipped me back off like a light-switch, stuck me on a shelf to get dusty until the next time. I had nothing to leave behind, when I ran away, but you. You had a team, you had friends. You had a _home_, and you just tossed it all in the trash. For me.”  
  
In the interest of honouring his request for honesty, Steve simply says, “yes. It wasn’t nearly as simple as you’re making it sound, but yes.”  
  
“Why would you do that? You didn’t even know for sure if I remembered you when you first came after me.”  
  
“Your mission was to kill me on that helicarrier, and instead you saved my life. That was enough to know you would remember, eventually.”  
  
“That’s stupid,” Bucky says bluntly, and it doesn’t make Steve angry because he understands where it’s coming from. He can’t say he wouldn’t react the same way, if he found out Bucky had built a decent life for himself and had thrown it all away because Steve showed up unexpectedly.  
  
“I don’t regret it.”  
  
“Why the fuck not? It’s not even like you threw your life away for _this_.” Bucky drops his backpack and gestures between them, indicating what they are to each other presently. “It was for some guy from your distant past who might not even know who you are. I was an assassin, I was a fucking war machine, Steve.”  
  
“On the outside.” Steve steps closer to him and pokes two fingers to the center of Bucky’s chest. “My Bucky was still in here.”  
  
“You didn’t know that,” Bucky protests weakly. His blue eyes are wide, and sad.  
  
“Yeah, I did. I can’t explain how, but I did.”  
  
“That other jet. The one we took to Siberia, the one you guys have been using since. It’s not yours, is it?”  
  
“Technically I think it’s Tony’s.”  
  
“You stole it.”  
  
Steve exhales nosily and steps away, spreading his arms out. “I’ve done a lot of illegal shit in the last few months, Buck, if you’re gonna start getting queasy about that now …”  
  
“I’m not queasy about anything, I’m just asking questions. You didn’t tell me about Hydra, who knows what else you’ve been keeping from me.”  
  
The accusation is like a swift punch to the solar plexus, although it’s not entirely unwarranted. “I thought you weren’t pissed at me anymore for that.”  
  
“I’m not!” Bucky cries, certainly sounding pissed about it, and then seems to realize that fact and softens his tone. “I’m not. But I know you. A lot better than they do.” He nods his head towards the door, indicating he means Natasha and Sam. “I know all about your need to be self-sacrificing, to shoulder every damn burden all on your own. I don’t want you keeping things from me. Were you living on it? When you weren’t with me?”  
  
“Not all the time.”  
  
“What does that mean?”  
  
“It means it’s complicated.” Steve moves his bag out of the way and sits on the edge of the bed. “And it wasn’t the same every time. Sam kept his apartment in DC for a while at first. Until we figured out it wasn’t safe to stay in one place too long. Nat and I bounced around.”  
  
“Bounced around like, safehouses?”  
  
“Sometimes. Other times, yeah, we parked the jet in a deserted field and slept on the floor.”  
  
Bucky swears under his breath, a few choice words and something that sounds like Steve’s name. Slowly, he comes over and sits heavily next to Steve, shoulders slumped and hands in his lap. His flesh fingers twist around the metal ones, anxious, like he isn’t yet used to having a left hand to touch with his right. “Tell me about where you were living before all that.”  
  
“It was a few different places then, too. When I was first defrosted, I was with SHIELD. At their facilities. Then I had an apartment, in DC. For a year or so, around the time you resurfaced. Then when SHIELD fell apart, I lived in Tony’s skyscraper in Manhattan, with the other Avengers. And then at a compound he built, in Upstate New York. Nat and I trained Sam and Wanda and Vision, there. That was the last place, before …”  
  
“Before you found me in Romania,” Bucky surmises, gloomily. “And I killed Stark’s parents, so you couldn’t go back there after. That’s where all your stuff is. A compound in Upstate New York, owned by a man who hates you because of me.”  
  
“Yes,” Steve confirms. He wishes he could deny it, but Bucky’s right, and he deserves the truth.   
  
“Jesus.”  
  
“It’s just things, Bucky. And not even particularly important things. Everything that actually meant something to me was in our apartment in Brooklyn, and I have no idea where it all ended up when neither of us came back from the war. The stuff at the compound was … clothes, and toothpaste, and a few books. It didn’t matter. And if I had to do it again –”  
  
“Don’t do that.”  
  
“I would choose you. Over and over again,” Steve continues, ignoring him. He inches in closer, tucking his leg up on the bed to turn to Bucky and shake his shoulder lightly.  
  
“Yeah, well,” Bucky sighs. “You never did have any sense.”  
  
“And you’re not the one who _made_ me choose,” Steve reminds him gently. “I would’ve brought you back to our headquarters. You could have joined us, if it was up to me. But it wasn’t. Tony drew that line in the sand. Not you.”  
  
Bucky doesn’t answer. He looks down at his hands again; flesh and Vibranium fingers folding together and squeezing until his skin goes as white as the room.  
  
Steve takes a chance, and leans over close enough to hold Bucky’s head in his hand and press a lingering kiss to his temple, just below his hairline. Against the warm skin, he murmurs, “a lot of shit happened. None of it was your fault. I’m gonna keep saying that until you believe it. And if it all happened again a hundred times over, exactly the same as before, I’d still choose you. Every single time.”  
  
Bucky leans over, just a little, just enough for his shoulder to press into the center of Steve’s chest. Steve wraps his arms around him, resting his forehead against the side of Bucky’s face.  
  
“When I was in your apartment in Bucharest. You had a book with my picture in it.”  
  
Bucky brings his hands up and curls his fingers over Steve’s left forearm. “What about it?”  
  
“What was it?”  
  
“I was trying to figure everything out. It didn’t all come back like flipping a switch, it was piece by piece.” His cheek moves against Steve’s nose as he speaks softly, where they’re pressed close together. “When I saw stuff in the newspaper or wherever that felt familiar, I saved it. Even if I didn’t know why it felt familiar. Looking at it all helped me put the pieces together.”  
  
“How much of it was stuff about me?”  
  
Bucky turns his head just a little, so his nose bumps Steve’s. “At first it was only stuff about you. You were the one thing I knew for sure I remembered. It was a while before anything else started coming back.”  
  
“Did it scare you?” Steve asks quietly.  
  
“To death,” Bucky answers.  
  
“Buck.” Steve nudges his cheek. Bucky turns his face a little further. “Can I kiss you?”  
  
“Always,” Bucky says, and kisses the corner of Steve’s mouth.  
  
Steve chases after his lips, moving them together in a slow, warm slide.  
  
“I didn’t even know who you were, but I knew I loved you,” Bucky whispers, and Steve’s stomach flips over itself.  
  
“I loved you every minute you were gone. Even when I thought I’d never see you again.” Steve kisses him again, deeper and more desperate, needing Bucky to understand. “And every minute for the rest of my life.”  
  
“Me too, Stevie.”  
  
* * *

  
Like the palace, everything inside the ship is white. Also like the palace, Bucky prefers his hut in the Border Village. It’s an incredibly impressive piece of technology. Mind-blowing, even to the others who have a much better understanding of the future than Bucky does. He was technically alive through decades of advancement in cars and computers and wireless internet, but he wasn’t privy to any of it. He never remembers questioning it, when his captors would hand him a new kind of gun or radio or protective equipment for his uniform. They’d so successfully turned his brain into mush that he never questioned anything at all, until he saw Steve.   
  
The future he’d woken up in is still too big, too complicated, too fast-paced for his ancient mind to properly comprehend any of it. Living on his own while he was on the run, having to learn about microwaves and cellphones, had been more than enough of a taste of this new world. He liked science and inventions, when he was younger. He still does in theory. They’re just so confusing, now. He much prefers his hut, his goats, his meager belongings. His life in Wakanda has been small and quiet, and above all else, safe. The airship feels dangerous. So many gadgets, functions, capabilities. And so much stark, shiny white. The warm browns and greens of his home with the Border Tribe were much more comforting.  
  
He wants to be here. Wants to help, wants to be involved in chipping further away at Hydra’s power, wants to be on the battlefield next to Steve so he can keep an eye on him, like he did during the war. But new things still leave him stressed and off-balance. He’s always so afraid some new shock could jolt him backwards, send his mind reeling back to past traumas, undo all the progress he’s struggled for these last few months. And it’s just so much white.  
  
* * *


	4. Bullseye

“What should we call you?” Natasha asks. She sits at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee wrapped in her palms. The ship is still foreign territory, but it’s far nicer than anywhere they’ve stayed in months, and she can easily see it becoming something like home relatively quickly. It’s more domestic than anywhere she’s lived in over a decade. The Red Room and her subsequent domiciles were as utilitarian as possible, and Stark Tower, while undeniably safe, was so high-tech it usually felt like living in a particularly vivid dream. The interior of this airship is sterile and shiny and yet still somehow comfortable.

Sam is next to her, Steve is rummaging through the fridge, and Barnes is hovering awkwardly next to the far counter, looking as out of place as Natasha imagines he feels.  
  
She watches, as he hesitates before answering, considering his options. She can see it all playing out on his face, her years of training coming in handy once again as she reads his emotions as easily as if they were written in words over his skin. His identity still feels fractured. Pieces of several very different lives combining in complicated ways to make up a scattered, confused person who’s still stuck in trying to figure out who he is, where he belongs, how he fits in the world around him – a world he still feels he doesn’t quite have a place in. He still has Hydra’s training in his head and their assassinations in his memories and their ancient technology under his skin, even if the trigger words are no longer effective. Natasha knows the struggle of that reconciliation. Knows the tenuous tightrope of using past training from bad people for present good, while at the same time trying to move on from it and become a better person than she was, then.  
  
He was starting to become comfortable in Wakanda, but there he’s someone new as well. An outsider welcomed graciously into their world, but their conception of him shifts who he is when he’s there. Their White Wolf, the favorite pet project of the Princess, the quiet stranger with the haunted eyes, the man who cares for the goats and keeps to himself and sometimes entertains the company of a world-famous superhero, except when Steve shows up he’s in jeans and he’s bearded and he doesn’t look like the images they might’ve seen of stars and stripes and justice personified.  
  
Somewhere underneath all the layers, all the different masks he wears, he’s Bucky from Brooklyn, but the only person alive who really knows that person is Steve, and she can understand why Barnes might want to protect that version of himself, keep it as the one thing he has left that’s truly his own.  
  
“Sergeant Barnes,” he decides, after a very long pause. Somehow, it isn't a surprise.  
  
Natasha nods, and tries to smile at him. Tries to make him feel welcome, as best as she can, which likely isn’t that great. Sam is much better at being warm, but he’s still distrustful of Steve’s old friend. Next to her, he quips, “I’ll be Colonel Klink,” and Barnes doesn’t get the joke. His smile is flat, and he accepts the bottle of water Steve hands him but remains silent while they discuss tactical strategies.  
  
Ten minutes later, Sam heads to the cockpit and Natasha settles on the couch with a tablet. Out of the corner of her eyef, she watches Steve glance over his shoulder to make sure she isn’t looking at them, and then press a quick kiss to Barnes’ cheek before he leaves the room. Barnes smiles in response, but then sits at the table, and doesn’t follow him.  
  
* * *  
  
  
A few hours in the air, and they’re in Kazakhstani airspace, hovering high above a range of rough, imposing mountains with the bland backdrop of sand surrounding them. They’d flown over lush trees and lakes as Sam guided the aircraft to the coordinates Natasha gave him, but now the landscape below them is barren and deserted except for a massive structure nestled in a hidden basin, the same color as the mountain it’s built into for maximum camouflage.  
  
A room right in the center of the ship on the first floor, that Natasha has already appropriately nicknamed the ‘War Room’, is filled with touch screens attached to various cameras, heat sensors, and microphones. It’s much less domestic in appearance than the rest of the ship; where other rooms are cozy and crisply decorated and sunny, this one has black walls and at least a dozen screens, like something out of a science fiction movie. Sam imagines Kirk and Spock would feel right at home, here, zipping through the galaxy, communicating with alien races on the screens. There is also a button that turns the floor underneath their feet to invisible glass, so they can watch vehicles coming and going from the facility with ease. Sam can’t imagine how much easier American war efforts would have been with this technology. Then he remembers the things his government has done in the world, and he’s glad they don’t have it.  
  
“This is crazy,” Steve says, voicing what they’re all thinking, as he tests out the monitor that controls the heat sensors. Dozens of red, human shaped figures appear on the screen, in various rooms below them. The figures move about, talking with each other, some carrying objects that appear green and blue in their lack of heat emission.  
  
“Nobody tell Tony a 16-year-old girl is better than him at basically everything,” Natasha says, with a smirk. She brings a large map up on the touch-screen platform in the center of the room, and points at it. “There’s some kind of reactor, here.”  
  
“I’m gonna tell Stark that the very first chance I get,” Sam asserts. It’s not likely he’ll ever really get that chance. Holding grudges isn’t the healthiest thing in the world but that billionaire asshole tried to kill Sam only a few months ago because a blast fired by a robot that had been meant for him hit Colonel Rhodes instead.

He barely catches it, but he swears a smile passes over Steve’s face just for a moment before he schools his features, as if he knows it isn’t nice to have been amused. Freed from his Captain America mantle, Sam finds he likes Steve more and more every day. He’s a much more interesting person when he isn’t caught up in what he’s _supposed _to do and instead just reacts genuinely. Learning he can be petty like the rest of them is a welcome crack in that façade.  
  
In the corner, Barnes stands motionless, a frown twisting his forehead. He stares down at the clear floor, unblinking, at the roof and the trucks and the sand they can see through it.  
  
“Buck?” Steve asks, noticing at the same time Sam does.  
  
“I’ve been here before,” Barnes says quietly. “I think.”  
  
All three of them look up in surprise, and then Sam shares a worried glance with Natasha before she looks at Barnes. “You think?”  
  
“Hard to … my memories aren’t always. Reliable.” He sounds frustrated, and he pushes his long hair back as he looks up, eyes locking with Steve’s.  
  
“But you recognize something?” Steve asks.  
  
Barnes nods. “I can’t explain it, I just feel like I’ve been here.”  
  
Natasha gestures him over, zooming in on the map with her fingers and stepping back to let him examine it a little closer. Her left shoulder bumps Sam’s as she accidentally steps into him. Steve, alternately, steps closer to Barnes. Their own shoulders almost touch as Steve moves in next to him, dipping his head down to try to see Barnes’ face underneath the protective curtain of his hair, eyebrows twisted and mouth downturned and eyes as concerned as if Barnes had just announced a terminal illness. He’s ridiculously overprotective, and Sam would tease him over it if he didn’t understand it as much as he does. He remembers too well the man he himself would’ve died to protect without a second thought.  
  
“I don’t know,” Barnes says, with another frustrated sigh.  
  
“That’s okay, Buck,” Steve says softly. His hand twitches, by his side, and then his fingers curl into a fist. Sam watches it, seeing the moment Steve _almost _reached out and touched and then remembered they weren’t alone. Sam wishes he’d just do it. He grinds his teeth and wishes Steve would just admit, already, the feelings that are obviously there just beneath the surface, beneath his paper-thin public camouflage of them. Whether Barnes returns those feelings, that Sam really can’t tell. He doesn’t know Barnes as well, and he’s so much more stoic and harder to read.  
  
“I will,” Barnes says, ignoring Steve and looking to Natasha. His frown has turned from distressed to determined. “I’ll remember, I’ll … work on it.”  
  
She nods, and her voice is unusually kind as she says, “sure, Sergeant. That’d be good.”  
  
“So, what do we do now?” he asks. “I’m assuming we don’t just drop down there and take everyone out.”  
  
“Surveillance,” Natasha answers. She moves back to the main platform, playing with the map again with her fingers. “Maybe for a while. We can’t just storm the base without figuring out what they’re up to, first. What they’re planning.”  
  
“It’s never good, is it? What Hydra’s … planning.” Barnes’ face has lot a bit of its color, and before she answers, Natasha sympathetically places a hand on his shoulder, just for a moment before it falls away.  
  
“No. It’s never good.”  
  
Steve’s jaw is clenched so tight a vein is popping along his temple. So many words look to be barely contained inside him, but as soon as he notices Sam watching, he blinks and looks away.  
  
* * *  
  
  
The door to his bedroom opens an inch as Steve is pulling his socks off. Looking up, he sees Bucky’s eyes peering through the gap, and he gestures for him to come in. Bucky does. He’s in sweatpants and a t-shirt, not his usual Wakandan sleeping attire. Steve doesn’t ask about it, assumes he was provided some clothing by someone at the palace. Bucky moved to Wakanda without a single possession, and they’ve been so good to him. Sometimes Steve wishes they could have recovered a few of the things from his apartment in Bucharest. He didn’t have much, and most of it was nondescript and impersonal, but they were still _his_. The spatula next to the stove and the dish towel on the hook and the clothes in his closet were still his things, things he’d collected as he tried to piece his life back together after decades robbed of an identity, and he should have been allowed to keep them.  
  
Bucky hesitates by the door once it’s shut behind him, and Steve frowns in confusion. “What?”  
  
“You want me in here, right? I don’t have to be, I can sleep in my own room. We’re gonna be on top of each other enough, the next little while.”  
  
The uncertain look on his face hurts in Steve’s chest a little bit, and he goes over and takes Bucky by the waist. “‘Course I want you here,” he assures, kissing the corner of Bucky’s mouth.  
  
Bucky’s arms go around his shoulders. Steve lets go of him with one hand so he can smooth it down the new arm, over the smooth black metal and glittering gold. “Still doin’ okay, with this?”  
  
Bucky blinks, and his throat clicks over a swallow. “You mind if I take it off? To sleep?”  
  
Steve shakes his head. “Whatever you want.”  
  
Bucky moves away from him. He presses at something under the arm near the base of it, and it clicks as it detaches. He places it on top of the dresser, and looks at it for a moment. Steve moves in behind him, curling his arms back around Bucky’s waist from the back and resting his chin on Bucky’s shoulder.  
  
“It’s pretty,” he says. “Vibranium, I mean. Glows almost like it’s alive.”  
  
“I can feel, with this one,” Bucky says. Steve hadn’t known that.  
  
“Oh. That’s … wow.”  
  
“Not as much as my real hand. But there’s sensation in the fingertips.”  
  
“Is that good?”  
  
“It’s … I’m not used to it, yet. Maybe it will be, though. Eventually.”  
  
Steve nods. He tightens his arms around Bucky’s middle, and smiles against his cheek when Bucky leans back against him. It’s more complicated, being here, than it has been in Wakanda the last few months. They’ve never lived as simply, or as freely, as they do there. In Brooklyn they had to hide, lie, sneak around to keep their cover. In Wakanda they can just exist. But when Bucky’s in Steve’s arms, against him, close to him, everything slips back into place.  
  
“Come to bed?” Steve runs his nose along Bucky’s cheek, and Bucky doesn’t resist being pulled toward the large, comfortable mattress and tucked underneath soft, thick blankets. He curls easily into Steve’s arms. Steve always wants so much to take care of him. To protect him and make him smile, make him feel as loved as he is, chase away all those shadows that linger within him.  
  
“Can I ask you something?” Bucky asks, with his face close to Steve’s, sharing a pillow.  
  
“Of course you can.”  
  
“What do you think would’ve happened, after the war? If we’d both made it out?”  
  
Steve presses a soft kiss to Bucky’s lips, and hooks a leg over his knees to keep him close. “I don’t know. Maybe we could’ve been together somewhere. Bought a little farm upstate, kept to ourselves so we didn’t have to hide so much.”  
  
“Could’a had goats, maybe,” Bucky says, with a smile against Steve’s mouth.  
  
Steve smiles too, and cards his fingers through Bucky’s hair. “We got all that now. That’s enough for me. Having you back is enough, I don’t care where we end up.”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“You really think you’ve been here before?”  
  
Bucky nods. His forehead rubs against Steve’s and his fingers gather a handful of the back of Steve’s t-shirt.  
  
“M’sorry,” Steve murmurs, truly feeling it in his bones. “I could say I hope nothing bad happened to you here, but that’s probably not realistic.”  
  
“I don’t remember. I guess we’ll deal with it once I do.”  
  
Steve inhales. Bucky always smells like home, and Steve wants to burrow into him and never come back out.  
  
* * *  
  
  
_“Mission report.”_  
  
_“Target hit,” the Soldier answers. He blinks, stares straight ahead._  
  
_“Casualties?”_  
  
_“None. Clean shot, from the roof. No witnesses.”_  
  
_“Good.”_  
  
_A hand reaches for him. The Soldier grits his teeth and does not flinch. But the hand does not hurt. It pats his wrist, once, twice, three times, lightly. To someone across the room, his handler says, “clean him up.”_  
  
_Other hands grab him, rougher around his arms, hauling him to his feet. But then the voice returns, from near the door, and adds, “nicely, gentlemen. He’s done well.”_  
  
Bucky inhales. The white walls dissolve back into his line of vision. The darkened room, the clear, starry night sky outside through the window, Steve next to him in the bed. Bucky is sitting, back against the wall and legs tucked under his arm, as he gets stuck in memories in the middle of the night, while Steve sleeps soundly. He looks down, at tousled dark blond hair on the pillow and relaxed features, long eyelashes dusting the tops of high cheekbones, the beard he still hasn’t shaved making him look older even though he hasn’t really aged a day since 1943.  
  
They’re taking the surveillance in shifts. Romanov drew up a schedule, so that no one will be awake more than one night in a row. Wilson had offered to take the first night shift, leaving the rest of them to retire after an evening of planning to their bedrooms. Bucky had gone first to his own, until he’d heard Romanov’s door click closed, and then moved silently across the hallway in his socks to Steve’s.  
  
He reaches out to touch, brushing the tips of the fingers lightly over Steve’s cheek. On the dresser, his Vibranium prosthetic glints in the moonlight.  
  
_The old one belonged to Hydra_, Steve had said, _but you never did. And this new arm is yours. Made for you because you asked for it. Your choice._  
  
Bucky isn’t always so sure about any of that, but right now, looking at the metal hand a few feet away while Steve sleeps next to him, he maybe starts to believe it just a little. It’s a juxtaposition, between his past and his future. On one side Steve, who he’s always had beside him, always loved, always cherished; on the other side the relentless ghost of Hydra still in those fingers even though these new ones are Vibranium and made by Shuri and given to him because he asked for it, like Steve said. And the promise of what he could do with that new arm. The people he could save, instead of hurt.  
  
Steve stirs, and his eyes half-open, looking up at Bucky blearily. His lips curve into the tiniest smile. “Hey,” he mumbles.  
  
“Sorry. Go back to sleep.”  
  
“What’re you doin’?” Steve’s eyes slip closed and then he cracks open just one, just a hint of blue peeking out at Bucky in the darkness.  
  
A swell of emotion nearly chokes him, and this time, Bucky doesn’t fight it. He leans over and kisses Steve’s forehead, whispering to him, “I love you so much.”  
  
“Buck …” Steve whispers back, still sleepy but his voice is laced with emotion too. Sometimes in the dark it’s easier to give in to those feelings. Safer, when no one else can see. “C’mere.”  
  
He lifts his arm, and Bucky slides down, letting Steve fold him up in a heavy-limbed, sleep-warm embrace. Memories from Brooklyn flood back so easily – the soft, blurred-around-the-edges type, where Bucky’s mind glosses over their struggles to pay the bills and the leaky pipes and how much it hurt sometimes that he couldn’t hold Steve’s hand in public, and focuses only on rainy Saturday afternoons and sunsets on the fire escape and Steve beautiful and breathless underneath him in their bed. Bucky lived to take Steve apart with his hands and his mouth and hold him trembling after. They were so young and so in love, and so blissfully unaware of all that was coming for them.  
  
“Did you have a nightmare?”  
  
“No. I’m fine, Stevie.”  
  
“Why are you awake?”  
  
“Just can’t sleep. You should, though. I’m okay.”  
  
Steve rolls into him, pushing up to one arm to scoot closer and then dropping his tired body down half on top of Bucky’s. Bucky curls his arm around him, and Steve’s face finds the crook of his neck. “Can I help?”  
  
“You are helping,” Bucky tells him honestly. “Just being here.”  
  
* * *  
  
  
Steve and Natasha are already awake and in the kitchen when he trudges tiredly in after a long night alone in the War Room, struggling to stay alert as he watched a whole lot of absolutely nothing unfolding on the various screens. Natasha is at the table with a cup of coffee in front of her and a tablet in one hand, scrolling absently over the touch-screen. Steve is at the counter, with silver bowls and measuring cups surrounding the area and a mess of flour on his hands and shirt. It’s on his nose, as well, when he turns, and Sam cracks up despite his exhaustion.  
  
“Man, what the hell are you doing?”  
  
“Trying to make muffins,” Steve answers sheepishly.  
  
“Have you ever made muffins in your life?”  
  
“Yes!” Steve exclaims. He tries to push long strands of blond hair out of his eyes with the inside of his wrist and ends up leaving a smear of flour over his forehead. “Just not recently.”  
  
“Meaning, not since 1939,” Sam concludes.  
  
“Maybe.” Steve grins at him, chuckling at himself, and going back whisking batter in a bowl.  
  
Behind Sam, Barnes’ grumpy, scratchy voice says, “move. Please.”  
  
He gets out of his way but rolls his eyes as he does it. “Morning, sunshine.”  
  
“Morning, Feathers,” Bucky returns.  
  
“Get him coffee,” Steve advises, without looking up from his baking. “He won’t be nice until you do.”  
  
“In the pot,” Natasha says, pointing to the counter opposite Steve.  
  
Barnes shuffles over, his hair a hysterical mess and his t-shirt rumpled. He takes a mug from an overhead cupboard and pours himself a cup.  
  
Natasha shuts the tablet off, and stands. She addresses Sam. “I’ll take the next shift. Anything I need to know?”  
  
He shakes his head. “They didn’t do a damn thing. It was riveting.”  
  
“Get some sleep,” Natasha tells him, as she walks past him and out of the room. Over her shoulder, she calls to Steve, “bring me a muffin, if you don’t burn the kitchen down.”  
  
“I’ll do my best,” Steve calls back.  
  
Barnes takes Natasha’s spot at the table, holding his coffee mug in both hands and sipping it, eyes closed and exhaling deeply.  
  
“Save me one, too,” Sam says to Steve. “Y’know, if you don’t burn the kitchen down.”  
  
“Your faith in me is nothing short of awe-inspiring,” Steve returns sarcastically.  
  
Sam grins. He grabs an apple from a bowl on the counter and takes it with him back to his bedroom. He doesn’t manage a single bite of it before he’s crashing into his bed and slipping instantly into sleep.  
  
* * *  
  
  
Bucky’s used to long periods of boredom. Or, not even boredom necessarily, but inaction. For two years he hid in a one-room apartment in Romania, without a television or a radio or any other forms of electronic entertainment, venturing outside only when necessary for food or supplies. In Wakanda there were many days when feeding a dozen goats made up the entirety of his schedule. He’s accustomed to stretches of hours or days with nothing to do. The others aren’t. They’re used to action, to throwing punches and firing weapons and running for their lives. He sees them restless, as they sit in the War Room for days on end, watching armoured trucks coming and going to the facility, watching people inside the sand-colored walls, taking notes and tracking patterns.  
  
They have pages of them now, a week into their surveillance, some in files on a touch-screen on the wall and others on paper scraps tacked up onto a cork-board in the corner of the room. They’ve created a timeline, a list of working theories, a chart of repeated activities. On a Tuesday morning, Bucky sits in the room with Romanov, watching a truck unload steel beams through a wide loading door at the back of the building. She is zoomed in on a screen, closely examining the men. She’s taking still shots of faces, adding any new ones to their ever-growing list. Bucky is seated cross-legged on the floor, simply staring down through it and watching the activity, 40 feet below in the sand.  
  
“So, they’re building something.”  
  
“Good solve, detective,” she cracks, grinning at him.  
  
Bucky smiles back. “Thanks, I’ve been working on my sleuthing skills.”  
  
“Good news for us.” Romanov clips another image, and says, “Eyebrows seems to be running this particular show.”  
  
Bucky licks his lips, and looks at the board across the room where they’re attempting to create a pyramid illustrating the chain of command. The man they’ve nicknamed Eyebrows has been placed close to the top. “Any thoughts on what they’re building?”  
  
“Your guess is as good as mine, Sarge.”  
  
He watches below his ankles as the men finish their unloading, and then two climb back into the truck and drive it back down the dirt road that disappears around the side of a hill and out of sight. “We should have trackers on those trucks, so we know where they’re coming from.”  
  
“I was thinking that, too. Next time they leave one parked here overnight, one of us should go down there.”  
  
“Could we do that? Without getting caught?”  
  
“I don’t get caught unless I want to,” she answers. Bucky can hear the smirk on her face.  
  
They fall into silence for a few minutes. Romanov continues typing, noting what they just witnessed in their daily logs. Bucky gets up and goes over to the heat-sensor monitor, watching the red figures inside the building carrying the beams to a warehouse and stacking them up against a wall. They give no indication as to what they might do with them at a later date, and the figures disperse to different areas of the facility once they complete their task. Bucky watches one of them make coffee in what they’ve assumed is a kitchen, another settle in a chair near him, while another three head back to a wing that appears to be sleeping quarters.  
  
“How are you settling in?” Romanov asks, from behind him.  
  
Bucky keeps watching the screen. “Alright, I guess.”  
  
“Y’know, Steve was pretty pissed at me for calling you. Telling you about all this.”  
  
“I figured he would be. He’s … protective. Sometimes in a good way. Sometimes to a fault.”  
  
“I’d agree with that assessment.”  
  
“Can I ask you something?” He turns, watching as she leans further over the platform, tucking her short blond hair behind her ear as she does.  
  
“Sure.”  
  
“Did I ever hurt you?” He both wants to know and doesn’t. It feels important to have an accurate picture in his head of the things he’s done, and at the same time he wishes he could just forget all of it.  
  
“What, you mean like my feelings?” She glances sideways at him, and Bucky can tell she knows what he means but is deflecting, giving him the chance to back out of the question.  
  
He wishes he could. “No. When I was …”  
  
“When you weren’t you.”  
  
Bucky nods. It’s on the tip of his tongue, as always, to argue that his crimes are still his to own, whether or not he was in control of them. But this time, he doesn’t.  
  
“I’m not some damsel in distress,” she says, flatly. “I can take a punch.”  
  
“So that’s a yes.”  
  
“We crossed paths a couple of times, yeah.”  
  
“What did I do?”  
  
“Which time?”  
  
He exhales, and doesn’t know how to answer. Again – and again and again and again – he’s torn in half. He wants her to tell him every detail of every time they encountered each other. He wants to know who he’d been sent to kill, whether he was successful, the exact number of civilian casualties, the total cost of property damage, whether anyone suffered. He also wants to get up and walk away and never bring it up again.  
  
Movement catches his eye, and he looks down to see Romanov pulling up her t-shirt, revealing a small, puckered mark, low on her abdomen just above the waistband of her tight black pants. _Yoga pants_, Wilson had called them. Bucky doesn’t know what that means. He recognizes the scar instantly. He even has a decent guess as to the type of bullet that caused it.  
  
“Not the first time I’ve been shot.” She drops her shirt, and shrugs one shoulder as if she’s discussing a bruise or a stubbed toe. “Not the last time, either. Not the last time I was shot by you, come to think of it.”  
  
“I’m sorry,” Bucky mumbles. It sounds so stupid, so inadequate, so ridiculously small. Two little words, as if they could possibly make up for anything.  
  
She looks sideways at him again, regarding him with that unnervingly observant look she’s so skilled at, like her eyes are an infallible lie-detector. He sizzles under the heat of it, and turns away again, back to the board. The figure in the kitchen is seated, now, with the other one, with small balls of heat in their hands that must be coffee mugs.  
  
“Look at me,” she says.  
  
He does, and the kindness and understanding in her eyes is unexpected – both because they’re not emotions he’s seen her show before in such volume, and because Bucky is certain he doesn’t deserve them.  
  
“Believe it or not, you aren’t the only person I know who’s been mind-controlled into doing things he wouldn’t do otherwise.”  
  
“I’m not?”  
  
“It’s surprisingly common, as far as diabolical plots go. Men are never as original as they think they.” She smiles for just a moment, and then her expression fades back into serious and sympathetic. “It seems like bad guys like to watch good guys turn on each other. I guess because they want everyone else to be as miserable as they are.”  
  
Bucky nods and swallows over the lump that rises in his throat.  
  
She reaches out her hand. Bucky steps forward and takes it, and she squeezes her fingers tightly around his palm as she says, “I forgive you, okay? I forgive you because it wasn’t really you. Because you’re here now, trying to make things right. And I forgive you because I’ve done bad things too. I wouldn’t fare much better than you in a world where people don’t get second chances.”  
  
“Thank you,” Bucky manages to say, even if it comes out shaky and more emotional than he’s comfortable with. He’s getting better at opening up to Steve. It still feels too raw and exposed with anyone else. “You can call me Bucky, if you want.”  
  
She considers him with squinted eyes. “What do _you_ want?”  
  
“I don’t know,” he admits. “I’m still trying to figure out who I am, after everything. Feels like I’m a bunch of different people all kinda smushed into one, but … Steve is the only one who really knows Bucky. Other people used to, but they’re all dead now.”  
  
“I understand that. Better than you know.” She lets go of his hand, and then extends hers again, in the position of a handshake this time. Bucky takes it, and she shakes it curtly, almost professionally, like they’re being introduced for the first time. “Bucky, then. I’m Natasha, nice to meet you.”  
  
“Yeah.” Bucky manages a more genuine smile, as he nods at her. “You too.”  
  
* * *  
  
  
The others agree GPS trackers on the trucks are a good idea, and Natasha does venture down to the ground, well after dark the next night. There are only three trucks parked behind the compound, of the seven they’ve identified so far, but it’s a start. Sam straps his wings on and flies her down, easier than taking one of the smaller jets since it’s only a drop of a few dozen feet. They land silently in the sand, and he stands guard as she rolls underneath the trucks and attaches devices underneath the rear wheels. The night air is fresh and chilly, and it smells like it might rain so she works quickly. Steve and Bucky are monitoring the cameras and the heat sensors above them, but she doesn’t pick up more than the sound of a light breeze whistling through the mountains around her as she sticks the last tracker on, activates it, and hurries back to Sam. He wraps his arms around her waist and takes off, and they’re back on the aircraft within five minutes of their departure.  
  
Steve smiles at them as the climb back in, and claps Sam on the shoulder. He is, much as Natasha had rebuked it in a moment of anger, still very much their leader. It isn’t official by any standards, but they all recognize it. Natasha turns her attention to Bucky, offering him a smile and an affirming nod. It was, after all, his suggestion that they track the vehicles. Straddling the line between patronizing him and validating him for a good idea is perilous, but he grins back, so she toed it successfully.  
  
It’s Steve’s turn to take the night shift, so he settles back in as Sam takes the wings off his back to hang them back up next to the rest of their tactical gear. Bucky offers to stay, as well, with a would-be-casual comment about not being tired yet, even though it’s after midnight and he was on the night watch only yesterday. Natasha keeps her smirk to herself as she heads toward her bedroom.  
  
Sam follows her, glancing behind himself as he does. Just as they reach their doors, he looks as if he’s about to say something to her, but then changes his mind, bids her good night, and disappears into his room.  
  
* * *  
  
  
Sometimes Bucky likes to be held down, when he’s with Steve. Not to the point of pain. He isn’t into any of that fetish stuff that he’s heard of but has been too chicken too actually look up. He just likes it, only sometimes, when Steve uses those big muscles, pushes him down into the mattress with his body weight, hard enough that if Bucky tried to wiggle free he wouldn’t easily be able to.  
  
Steve didn’t react well the first time Bucky asked for it, so he never asked for it again, but then Steve sort of did it once, and then he definitely did it another time, and now it happens. When Bucky needs it. He suspects Steve still doesn’t really like it. He doesn’t like the reason behind it, and Bucky doesn’t really either, but there’s a dark comfort in it; in being immobilized and someone doing things to him that he didn’t ask for and maybe doesn’t even want but can’t stop from happening because his arms are pinned down. There’s familiarity, in being made to just lie there and take whatever someone else wants to do to him. He didn’t like the things they did to him, that went further than physical torture. But they did it, so it’s familiar. It became so regular that he’d fully stopped resisting. So completely broken down that he believed, deep in whatever remained of his soul, that he was just a machine, just an object to be used.  
  
He’s never taken it that far, with Steve. He isn’t planning on it, either. Steve wouldn’t, even if Bucky did want to dabble in _that_. He can picture Steve’s face, his cheeks reddening and his forehead twisting and his jaw jutting forward and his Captain America voice, firm and low, _no, Buck, I’m not hurting you, not ever_, no questions asked, no room for debate. Steve’s always had rigid lines, such a sure and steady and unshakable concept of what things are right and what things are wrong, and knowingly doing the things that are wrong has never been a feature in his code. So Bucky wouldn’t even ask, if he did want that. But he doesn’t. Probably.   
  
The most Steve will consent to, and for the time being the most Bucky wants anyway, is pressing with those strong hands, fucking into Bucky quick and hard and holding him there with fingers that leave marks on Bucky’s ribcage. When Bucky shifts – just a little bit, just to test it – he can’t easily move his flesh arm out of the vice grip Steve has over his wrist. He flexes a little, struggling a bit harder, and then harder still, against the restraints of Steve’s hands. Usually, when Bucky tries to move, Steve lets go. This time, he doesn’t, and the resulting surge of blood through his veins is probably something he should be ashamed of, or work on with a therapist, but for the moment it’s too good to resist. He moans and his cock leaks heavily between them, and Steve snaps his hips into Bucky until they’re both grunting in release, leaving Bucky messy and twitching and unable to see straight for longer than usual after it’s over.  
  
Steve is ridiculously sweet after they do it like this, every time. He always removes himself so gently, and leaves for a moment to return with a warm washcloth, smoothing it over Bucky’s stomach, cleaning him off, and then even softer between his legs. Then he crawls over and lies beside him, pulling Bucky into his arms and kissing him, slow and tender and more careful than he needs to be. This time it’s worse, because he didn’t let Bucky up, and they both know it.  
  
“I didn’t really want you to let me go,” Bucky tells him, drumming his fingers in the center of Steve’s chest, over his heart. “You know that, right?”  
  
“Promise me you’d tell me, if you ever did. If there comes a point where you stop enjoying this.”  
  
“I promise,” Bucky says, but he isn’t sure he means it. Maybe it wrecks it, if Steve would let up that easily. Maybe that’s the whole thing; knowing he _couldn’t _get free if he did want to really try. Maybe he’s more fucked up than he thought.  
  
“We should have a word. So I know, if you wanted me to stop.”  
  
“You wouldn’t hurt me.”  
  
“I already do.” Steve takes Bucky’s hand and shows him his own wrist, already purple with bruises and wet with flecks of blood from where Steve’s fingernails had dug in. Bucky hadn’t even noticed.   
  
“Do you wanna stop?” Bucky asks, needing an honest answer. “If you really hate it …”  
  
“I hate …” Steve sighs. He kisses Bucky’s wrist, licking a drop of Bucky’s blood off his own lips. Then he lets Bucky’s hand go and rolls onto his back, pulling Bucky with him. Bucky tucks his head under Steve’s chin and lets Steve hold him close. Steve needs that, right now. “I hate knowing why. I hate what they did to you, I hate that you have to live with it. But if this helps …”  
  
“I don’t know,” Bucky admits. “I don’t know if it helps.”  
  
“Pick a word, then. So we’ve got a safety net.”  
  
“Hydra.”  
  
“That’s not funny.”  
  
“Sorry.” Bucky kisses the skin beneath his lips as an added apology. “How about … Commandos.”  
  
“Okay. That’s good.”  
  
“Hey, Steve?” Natasha’s voice rings out from behind the door, accompanied by a knock.  
  
Bucky startles, worried just for a moment that she’s going to burst into the room and discover them, but she doesn’t. He stays silent, as Steve sits up.  
  
“Yeah, what’s up, Nat?”  
  
“I think we found something.”  
  
“We’ll – I’ll be right there,” Steve calls back, sighing in frustration at what he’d almost said, and brushing his hands over his messy hair.  
  
“Is … um. Sorry, is Bucky in there with you? I don’t mean to …”  
  
“Yeah,” Steve says. Bucky realizes Steve doesn’t have much of a choice, because if he says no, she’ll go looking for Bucky elsewhere and won’t find him. “We’ll meet you in the War Room.”  
  
“Okay.” Her footsteps get quieter in the hallway as she walks away.  
  
Steve turns back to Bucky with a slight grimace. “Sorry.”  
  
“She already knew, didn’t she?” Bucky asks. “About us.”  
  
Steve nods. “Yeah. We don’t really talk about it, but yeah, she knows.”  
  
“Does Wilson?” Bucky doesn’t think he does, but has never outright asked.  
  
Steve shakes his head, and doesn’t elaborate. He gets up, his face twisted into an expression of annoyance, but at himself, not at Bucky. Steve gathers his discarded clothing and pulls his t-shirt back over his head. Bucky exhales deeply, and gets up as well.  
  
* * *  
  
  
Natasha displays nothing on her face, when he and Bucky enter the room, that hints at anything that transpired five minutes earlier in the bedroom wing. Instead, she’s standing over the video platform with Sam, frowning down with him at whatever is on the screen. She beckons them closer, and points down at an image of a concrete room, and six men standing around barrels with markings that Steve recognizes.  
  
His gut clenches. “Is that what I think it is?”  
  
She nods. “Just came in this morning, on the 8 AM delivery.”  
  
“Shit,” he swears, closing his eyes.  
  
Bucky peers over his shoulder, frowning. “What am I looking at?”  
  
“Uranium,” Natasha answers. “Likely weapons-grade. I doubt their evil schemes involve opening a power plant.”  
  
Bucky shakes his head, eyes moving between Steve and Natasha. “What does that mean?”  
  
“They’re building a nuclear weapon,” Steve tells him.  
  
“They’re building a WMD,” Sam corrects. He’s frowning as well, and his voice sounds exhausted. Steve remembers he was on watch, last night, and should be sleeping right now. “The kind that would make Hiroshima look like a flu outbreak.”  
  
Bucky still just stares at them, lips slightly parted, confusion written all over his face.  
  
“We both went under in the winter of 1945,” Steve explains to Sam. The pit in his stomach just gets worse by the second. “Hiroshima wasn’t until August.”  
  
“Can somebody tell me – ” Bucky begins, sounding exasperated.  
  
“It’s a massive bomb,” Natasha explains. “Imagine the most destruction in one event you can possibly think of, and then times it by 50. With that much uranium they could level half of Europe.”  
  
Bucky’s eyes widen. “What the hell do we do about that?”  
  
“I have no idea,” Natasha responds, heavily.  
  
Steve swears again, and smacks his hand on the platform. “Where the fuck did they _get_ that much? It’s supposed to be restricted!”  
  
“If you think American weapons manufacturers won’t sell anything to anyone for the right price …” Sam says, with a derisive snort. When Steve stares at him incredulously, he winces apologetically. “Sorry, Cap. The country isn’t the same one you defended in the war. In Afghanistan we had American-made shit used against us every single day. We just weren’t supposed to talk about it.”  
  
Steve doesn’t know how to properly process that. He despises it, it makes him sick to his stomach to consider contractors from his own country making deals with what’s left of the Nazis. Natasha leaves the room, swearing under her breath, and Steve needs some air or he’s going to explode, so he follows her, leaving Bucky and Sam standing helplessly next to the platform screen, Bucky calling out his name but Steve pretends not to hear it.  
  
* * *  
  
  
_“Du wurdest ausgebildet um zu gehorchen.” Her smile is cold. Unfeeling. The Soldier stands straighter, taller, unflinching.__ “Sergeant.”  
  
He frowns. He looks behind him, expecting to see the man she’s talking to over his shoulder, but no one is there. He turns back. “Mit wem sprichst du?” he asks.  
  
“Wir hätten dich zum Sterben zurücklassen können,” she answers.  
  
His jaw clenches, molars squeezing together. “Warum habt ihr es nicht getan?”_  
  
_Another icy smile curves her red-painted lips. “Wir wussten, dass du besonders bist. Deswegen haben wir dir ein neues Leben gegeben. Ein Leben von größerer Bedeutung als dein vorheriges.”_  
  
_“Sergeant.” This time the word is louder, more insistent. Deeper, too. A man’s voice. And this time her lips didn’t move._  
  
_The Soldier looks around. The walls have changed color, and she doesn’t look like a person anymore. She’s a shadowy blob, fuzzy at the edges.  
  
“Barnes!”_  
  
Bucky startles like being woken up by falling down the stairs in a dream. His heart pounds, thundering against his ribcage. He blinks, and the familiar surroundings of the War Room greet his eyes. The shadowy blur turns into Wilson, staring at him, his face twisted in concern and his hands raised up, palms out, like he’s trying to calm a wild animal.  
  
“You alright over there?” he asks warily.   
  
Bucky blinks a few more times and then tosses his head back and forth to clear it. “Yeah. I’m fine. Sorry.”  
  
Wilson’s frown just deepens, and he takes half a step closer, and then changes his mind when Bucky flinches involuntarily and hovers with one foot awkwardly out in front of him. “What the hell was that?”  
  
“Nothing.”  
  
“It wasn’t nothing. Steve left the room and you started speaking in German.”  
  
“I have it under control,” Bucky insists, and doesn’t give Wilson the space to argue before walking out of the room. In the hallway, he swears and leans against a wall, banging his head back against it, and trying to breathe his heartrate back to normal.  
  
* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Du wurdest ausgebildet um zu gehorchen.” – “You were trained to obey.”
> 
> “Mit wem sprichst du?” – “Who are you talking to?”
> 
> “Wir hätten dich zum Sterben zurücklassen können.” – “We could have left you for dead.”
> 
> “Warum habt ihr es nicht getan?” – “Why didn’t you?”
> 
> “Wir wussten, dass du besonders bist. Deswegen haben wir dir ein neues Leben gegeben. Ein Leben von größerer Bedeutung als dein vorheriges.” - “We knew you were special. We gave you a new life. A more important life than you had before.”
> 
> Thank you to my lovely Carly for the German translations.


	5. Limbo

A rainy afternoon while suspended in the sky is one of the weirder things Bucky has experienced lately. They’re high enough off the ground that they’re sitting in the lowest layer of cloud cover, so sitting on the couch in the sitting area next to a massive window feels a little bit like being caught right inside the storm. Grey and white swirls on the other side of the glass, fat raindrops appearing from nowhere and dropping down to the ground below. Now and then soft flickers of lightening cast shadows in the darkened room, and the low, distant rumble of thunder vibrates in his chest. He leans sideways against the cushions, knees tucked up close to his chest, and just watches, mesmerized by it.  
  
He isn’t sure where the others are, just now. Natasha might be sleeping. Steve was in the War Room, the last time Bucky saw him, but that was hours ago. He hasn’t seen Sam at all today. Bucky should probably make his way down the hall to check whether Steve needs to take a break, but he can’t bring himself to do it right at this moment. The storm outside is too transfixing to stare into.  
  
_“I’m looking up at you.”_  
  
_“Yeah. I’m not totally used to it yet, either.”_  
  
_Steve bites at his bottom lip, looking down at himself. Over the expanse of his suddenly massive chest, eyes adjusting to the ground being a foot further away than it used to be. Bucky can’t wrap his mind around it. He probably isn’t in any state to wrap his mind around anything at all, still a bit woozy and disoriented and trying desperately to push the memories away as simply nightmares, but this would be too big for him to comprehend even if he hadn’t just spent weeks in a prison and days strapped to an operating table. Or maybe he spent weeks there, as well. He couldn’t keep track of time. Slipping in and out of consciousness made it impossible._  
  
_Bucky steps in a little closer to him, but then second-guesses it and steps back. He fumbles, fingers tugging at his own shirttails, unsure of what he should do or say or think. They’re alone, finally. Arriving back at basecamp had been a flurry of activity. Of cheering soldiers and frantic doctors and commanding officers demanding debriefing meetings. Then Bucky had been given a room, and a bathtub in which to clean himself up, and an ornately carved mirror over the sink that he’d covered with a sheet because he couldn’t look into it. Couldn’t meet his own gaze; too afraid his eyes would betray the things he’s struggling to forget. Until now, the worst pain he’d ever felt was a broken toe. He isn’t sure the human mind is capable of forgetting the kind he knows now._  
  
_And then he’d joined Steve for a drink at the bar, slapping a stoic smile onto his face while Agent Carter flaunted herself in a red dress and looked at Steve like she wanted to devour him whole right there in front of everyone, with Bucky shoved off to the side. Unwanted, replaced. No longer the center of Steve’s universe, because Steve doesn’t need him anymore. Not now, not when he’s over six feet tall with shoulders broader than a barn and strong, sure hands and arms like Christmas hams. No, he only needed Bucky when he was small, and weak, and sickly, and no one but Bucky ever bothered to look past that and see the courageous heart and generous soul underneath._  
  
_“Looks good on you. The uniform,” he says, after what must have been an eternity of stilted silence. They’re back up in Bucky’s room, but he doesn’t expect Steve to stay long._  
  
_Steve shrugs, and smiles just a little. “Not as good as it looks on you. But thanks.”_  
  
_“It’s everything you always wanted.”_  
  
_“It’s one of the things I wanted,” Steve corrects, with a small frown furrowing his brow. “Not everything.”_  
  
_Bucky licks his lips. On his right thigh, a bruise throbs with his heartbeat._  
  
_“I missed you,” Steve says softly. His face is so earnest, when Bucky looks up at him. Eyebrows tilted up in the middle, eyes shining in the low lamplight, a shy smile on his face. It was always pretty, his face. Always looked like he could’ve been the model for a Renaissance painting of an angel. Now his jaw is stronger, squarer, more sturdy. He could always take a punch, but before it was mostly out of sheer will and stubbornness. Now he could take one because his bones are actually strong enough for it._  
  
_Bucky isn’t sure he likes it. The man standing before him looks like a god painted on Greek pottery. Underneath the dark green of that crisp, fitted uniform, Bucky bets he’d find rippling abdominals and bulging biceps. He bets the bumps of Steve’s spine are gone, hidden now under a thicker cover of muscle. He doesn’t want any of that. He wants his Steve, not this marble-carved Achilles. He wants the sweet boy who could curl right up in his lap, the one Bucky could playfully toss over his shoulder when Steve was in an agreeable mood, the lithe body he’d cherished. And then he loathes himself for the thought. How many times over the years had he sworn up and down that he loved Steve just the way he was, when Steve was ashamed of his height and his knobbly knees and the way his breaths rattled in his chest? And now Steve is healthy and robust in front of him, and Bucky should just keep right on loving him just the same._

_And maybe he would, if he weren’t so utterly terrified of losing him now that other people finally see what Bucky's seen all along. __And maybe that makes Bucky the most terrible person in the entire world, that some part of him would rather Steve had stayed small and sickly so Bucky could keep him forever all to himself._  
  
_“How did it even work, anyway?” he asks, instead of telling Steve he missed him too, because he doesn’t have adequate words to describe how much. How he’d been in trenches praying to a God he barely believes in to let him live so he could be back home with Steve one day. How often he’d pictured Steve’s face during his capture, expecting to die at any minute for weeks straight and wanting his final thoughts to be of Steve. “I mean, how … how did they do this? Magic isn’t supposed to be real.”_  
  
_“I’m not totally sure.”_  
  
_Bucky blinks. “You’re not sure?”_  
  
_“Yeah, I, it was some kind of serum. They injected me with it, and put me in this tube thing and … I don’t know. All I know is, it worked.”_  
  
_Bucky stares at him. For a moment it feels like he just got the old Steve back; the stubborn, self-sacrificing idiot who was always three steps ahead of ready to throw himself onto the fire for people who would’ve never in a million years done the same for him._  
  
_“What?” Steve asks defensively._  
  
_“You let some crackpot scientist experiment on you and you weren’t totally sure how it even worked? You didn’t ask before you let him do it?”_  
  
_“Well he said it would!”_  
  
_“What if he was wrong?” Bucky yells. He shakes his head, and laughs but there’s no humor in it, and pushes his hair back off his forehead. “You’re such a moron. You could’ve been killed and I would never have even known.”_  
  
_Steve regards him for a moment. When he speaks, his voice is heavy and weighted. “So could you. I thought you had, when I got here. They said … I went after you on the off-chance you might still be alive but I didn’t really think I was gonna find you. They said you were probably gone.”_  
  
_Any retort Bucky might’ve had to hurl back at him dies on his tongue. "Steve.”_  
  
_“I just …” Steve shrugs again, and his gaze falls to the floor between them. His eyelashes, still madly long, cast shadows down his cheekbones. “I wanted to help. I wanted to matter.”_  
  
_“And you didn’t before?” Bucky asks, voice cracking and betraying the breaking of his heart._  
  
_“I know I mattered to you. But that’s not the same as mattering.”_  
  
_He turns away, unable to look at Steve anymore for fear he’ll burst into tears if he does, and Steve amends his statement quickly, desperately._  
  
_“I didn’t … Bucky, I didn’t mean that.”_  
  
_“You did,” Bucky argues sadly. “But you’re right. It’s good you matter properly, now. To the army, and to Agent Carter.”_  
  
_Hands find his waist, Steve moving in close to him from behind. Bucky doesn’t push him away. Maybe he’s pathetic for it, but he still wants it, even if he’s a second choice, now. Even if he would never have been Steve’s first choice forever, even if all along he was just a place-holder until a pretty girl finally managed to look further than two inches in front of her own face to see Steve for what he really is. It shouldn’t have taken a magic serum. Some girl should have noticed the good in Steve years ago. Bucky will never stop resenting the whole human race for how much they’ve overlooked Steve, and how obviously they only care about him now that he’s useful._  
  
_He wonders if it hurt like this, when he used to go dancing with dates, or wink at pretty girls on the streets, or flirt at the corner store. No one else has ever looked at Steve the way Agent Carter did tonight, but Bucky knows people looked at him all the time, and Steve had to stand by and watch it. Bucky never knew what that felt like. He might never forgive himself, if it felt like this._  
  
_“It means everything to me, that I mattered to you,” Steve whispers. He presses a kiss to the top of Bucky’s head. He can do that, now. Because he’s taller._  
  
_“It’s okay,” Bucky says._  
  
_“It’s not okay,” Steve counters softly. “Please look at me?”_  
  
_Against his own better judgment Bucky turns. He finds clear blue eyes, and pink cheeks, and strong arms slide around his waist and he’s helpless to it. Gives in so easily to the comfort Steve’s arms offer. They always have, even when they were skinny._  
  
_“I love you,” Steve tells him, kissing Bucky’s forehead, the tip of his nose, and then hovering just shy of kissing his lips. Close enough that his warm breath ghosts over them. “So much. I always have. That was shitty, what I said. I swear I didn’t mean it.”_  
  
_“I missed you, too,” Bucky admits finally. It’s so strange, to have to reach up to wrap his arms around Steve’s neck._  
  
_Steve’s lips press softly into his. That, blessedly, is the same. The angle is different but their kiss feels and tastes just as it always did. Bucky is too weak to resist. He kisses Steve back, opens his mouth to let Steve in. Agent Carter is beautiful, and impressive, and a perfect match for Steve’s lion heart in a way Bucky never was. But he’s in love with the man against him, so completely it could only ever have ended in disaster. Because he’s too weak to do otherwise, Bucky will continue taking what he can get, until Steve stops letting him have it._  
  
A particularly loud clap of thunder rouses him. Bucky turns his face into the couch cushions, rubbing his skin against the soft fabric. The sting of jealousy lingers in his chest, even though the feelings are 70 years old and he knows now, better than he did then, that Steve was never looking to run off with the first skirt that looked twice at him. It still hurts when he thinks about how much better off Steve would have been if he’d survived the war and made a home with Peggy.  
  
Behind him, the sound of a throat clearing startles him, and he jumps slightly as he looks around. Sam is seated in an armchair across from him, a bowl of cereal in his hand and a look on his face that’s caught somewhere between concerned and unamused.  
  
“How long have you been sitting there?” Bucky asks, and then immediately regrets asking when Sam’s frown deepens.  
  
“You didn’t hear me come in,” he says. It isn’t a question, so Bucky doesn’t answer it.  
  
With a heavy sigh, Sam gets up and leaves the room, abandoning his cereal on the coffee table between them.  
  
* * *

“We gotta talk.”   
  
He finds Steve in the exercise room, that Sam had forgotten existed until he walks in on Steve with hand-weights bigger than his head and his ridiculous biceps bulging.  
  
“Damn, this place is like a flying cruise ship,” Sam says, looking around the home gym and shaking his head in wonder. It begs a lot of questions about why they spent months living out of their tiny quinjet and random stink-hole safehouses, if this aircraft was available to them all this time. Steve is too noble, or too stubborn, or feels too _guilty_, to ask the Wakandans for help unless it’s absolutely necessary. If it had been up to Sam no such concessions would have been made.  
  
Steve sets the weights down with a grunt and wipes his sweaty forehead with the back of his hand. “About what?”  
  
“Barnes.”   
  
“That’s not what he asked you to call him,” Steve reminds.  
  
“He’s unstable,” Sam says, not beating around the bush about it in a way that Steve likely appreciates. He’s always been a straight-shooter, since Sam’s known him, and they’ve never dressed anything up for each other. Some days he reminds Sam a little bit too much of Riley. “Yesterday, when the two of us were alone in the War Room, one minute he was James Barnes and the next minute he was staring off into space and speaking in German to someone who definitely wasn’t actually there.”  
  
A muscle in his jaw twitches, and Steve’s shoulders sag a little. Sam had briefly debated this conversation this morning over coffee with Natasha. It isn’t fair to burden Steve with something he can’t do anything about. And it isn’t fair to expect Barnes to be in perfect mental health, after everything he’s been through. But this isn’t tending to livestock in a tranquil pastoral village in the African countryside. What they’re doing out here is serious, and dangerous, and Sam can’t protect his team if he doesn’t believe everyone on it is up to the task at hand. Steve is a good leader but he has blind spots, and Barnes is the biggest one.  
  
“I had to practically scream his name to get him to snap out of it, yesterday,” Sam continues. “And he was standing two feet away from me. And just now by the couches I sat there staring at him for ten full minutes before he noticed me.”  
  
“Yeah.” Steve sighs heavily, and sits down on a padded bench. “I know.”  
  
Sam frowns. “What d’you mean, you know? Does that happen often?”  
  
“I’m not sure. He doesn’t like to talk about it.”  
  
“Can you ballpark it? Is it a few times a week? Daily?” Sam pushes.  
  
“I really don’t … it’s happened maybe a dozen times when I’ve been with him?” Steve looks up at him, with a wince. “But he doesn’t usually tell me about when it happens if I’m not around. And he brushes it off when I ask.”  
  
“And you’re comfortable letting him into the field with us?” Sam asks incredulously. He doesn’t want to pick a fight, but he can’t imagine what Steve’s thinking, putting them all at risk like this.  
  
“He’ll be okay.” Steve doesn’t know that for sure, and he does a terrible job of pretending he does.  
  
“Cap,” Sam says, tilting his head and giving Steve a tired look. He _is _tired, as much as he’s happy to be catching bad guys with two people he loves it’s still an exhausting lifestyle. He is definitely looking forward to taking Natasha up on that extended vacation once they wrap this one up. “You know what it is, right?”   
  
“I know he sees things. Flashbacks, I guess.”   
  
“I’ve seen a lot of it, working at the VA. It’s called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.”  
  
“I know that.” Steve’s head drops again, hanging down, his elbows resting on his knees like all the energy he’d had only minutes ago when he was lifting weights deflates right out of him, like somebody pulled the plug on a bouncy castle. “I Googled it.”  
  
“Do you know how serious it is? Steve, this isn’t something he can just walk off. It isn’t a few bad memories. And it isn’t flashbacks like déjà vu, they’re called dissociative episodes and they’re bad news. Especially when they’re so intense that you could be standing right next to him and he can’t hear you calling his name. I’ve seen lives destroyed by milder cases.”  
  
“We would’ve called it shellshock, during the war.”  
  
“What if it happens while we’re on a mission on the ground?” Sam asks. “In a _Hydra _facility that he thinks he’s been to before, with potential triggers around every corner?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Steve says again, and it isn’t a good enough answer, but Sam can tell it’s the best he’s got.  
  
“I knew he shouldn’t have come with us,” Sam mutters.  
  
“He’s not broken, Sam,” Steve says, voice switching from despondent to defensive.  
  
“I didn’t say he was. But you pretending this isn’t serious doesn’t help shit. It might be really serious. He might really be in trouble.”   
  
“What am I supposed to do?” Steve asks. He looks up, blue eyes shiny and sad, and Sam doesn’t have an answer for that. At least not one that he could implement right now. Barnes should be in counselling, he might need medication, and none of that is possible in a Wakandan airship hovering above a Hydra base in Kazakhstan. He and Barnes still tend to get on each other’s nerves a little more than is ideal, and he doesn’t have anything specifically against the guy but they aren’t exactly friends, and Sam suddenly feels horribly about that. He should have been nicer.  
  
He sits next to Steve on the bench, in silence that accomplishes nothing at all.  
  
* * *  
  
  
Sam sets three plates down on the kitchen table, going back to the counter for a fourth before sitting down to join them. They take turns with dinner, too, but everyone enjoys when it’s Sam’s turn. He always whips up delicious old family recipes. He’s really the only one of them who had a relatively normal life well into his 30s, as much as you could call active military service ‘normal’. Natasha never learned to cook in the Red Room. Steve and Bucky made meals for themselves as young adults in Brooklyn, but with the limited grocery items available during the Depression and the inter-war period, and neither of them have done much of it since being shot into the future.  
  
Steve groans appreciatively as he shovels Cajun-spiced chicken and pasta into his mouth, and propositions, “I will trade you your next four night-shifts for my next four meal-shifts.”  
  
“Deal,” Sam says immediately, sticking his hand out across the table, but Natasha smacks it away.  
  
“Not happening, we need everyone looking sharp. Steve can’t suddenly start sleeping 25 percent less than everyone else.”  
  
“Your next two shifts,” Steve bargains.  
  
Sam turns hopeful eyes to Natasha, as if she’s their mother, and she rolls hers. “Fine.”  
  
They shake on it over the pepper grinder.  
  
They eat in silence for a few minutes, until Bucky clears his throat, and looks apologetic as he brings up, “so, what do we do? About the bomb?”  
  
“No shop-talk at the table,” Sam says flatly, not looking up from his meal.  
  
“He’s right,” Natasha says, regretfully. “We need to brainstorm.”  
  
“Right after supper?” Steve diplomatically suggests a compromise.  
  
Sam agrees. He looks up at Bucky, smiling at him in a silent apology for snapping, and requests, “tell us about Cap when he was a kid.”  
  
“What do you wanna know?”  
  
“The most embarrassing things you can think of,” Natasha says, dodging the noodle Steve flicks toward her in retaliation. It lands on the door of the refrigerator and sticks, sliding slowly down and leaving a trail of sauce behind it.  
  
“Was he always as stubborn as he is now?” Sam asks.  
  
Bucky snorts. “Yes. Never wanted to accept help from anyone, even if it killed him. One time he refused to admit he had the flu and he passed out at school during geography. Our teacher came over to give him shit for it, and he puked on her shoes.”  
  
Sam laughs so hard he wheezes and has to thump a fist against his own chest to keep from choking on a mouthful of food.  
  
“Slander,” Steve declares dramatically, but he’s smiling too.  
  
Later, in the War Room, they stand around the touch-screen platform, and their collective good mood fades as they grapple with the somber reality of yesterday’s discovery. Natasha doesn’t need to say out loud what she knows they’re all thinking – that they, just the four of them with a fancy jet and a few personal weapons and an arrest warrant on their heads – don’t have the capability of dealing with that much uranium even if they could storm the base and take out all the agents. They’re definitely in over their heads.  
  
“Do you think they’re bringing in more?” Steve asks.  
  
“God,” Sam breathes, laughing humorlessly. “I can’t imagine them needing _more_. Unless they really wanna blow up the entire planet.”  
  
“How long will it take them to build it?” Bucky wants to know.  
  
Natasha shakes her head. “I don’t know. A while, it’s not like they could turn those cannisters into a weapon by the morning. But whether it’s a few weeks, or a few months, or a year, I really don’t know. Depends on a bunch of other factors we don’t know. How many technicians they have, what their cash-flow is like. Whether they have a specific target or are just going for general destruction.”  
  
“Do we have the blueprints for the weapon?” Steve looks up, looking past all of them toward one of the screens on the wall where they’ve been categorizing materials they know to exist in the facility. “Maybe if they’re still getting things delivered, we could take out one of the trucks and make it look like an accident. Set them back a little, buy ourselves some time.”  
  
“That’s a good idea.” Natasha drags her fingertips over the screen, switching it to the list Steve was referring to so they can all view it. “We don’t have the blueprints. I watched someone holding what looked like drawn-up plans the other day, but he never stood still long enough to get a clear shot.”  
  
“So, we go down there and get them,” Sam concludes. “Or at least get close enough to take a picture. If we outright steal them, we’ll give ourselves away.”  
  
“Yeah,” Steve agrees, and Natasha nods hers as well.  
  
Only Bucky stays quiet, staring down at the images on the screen from under a deeply furrowed brow.  
  
* * *  
  
Later in the evening, Natasha goes back into the kitchen, in search of a snack to sustain her while on surveillance duty until Bucky takes over at midnight. She finds him and Steve, in the adjoining sitting area. They aren’t touching, but they’re sitting closer on the couch than she would if it were her sitting next to either of them. They both look up as she enters, and Bucky immediately looks guilty and shifts on the couch, moving a little further away. The thought of it, that their instinct is to hide themselves away, leaves an uneasy feeling in her stomach.  
  
She grabs a banana and goes over to them, flopping down in the armchair across from them and kicking her socked feet up onto the coffee table.  
  
“Getting ready to relieve Sam?” Steve asks, clearing his throat and leaning back against the cushions in a way that could be perceived as casual, by someone who doesn’t know his mannerisms as well as she does.  
  
“In a few minutes, yeah. I just checked and he was in the middle of something, figured I’d let him finish.” She chews lightly at the inside of her lower lip, and looks pointedly between them. “What are you two up to?”  
  
“Nothing,” Bucky answers.  
  
Natasha tilts her head to one side. They’ve been here two weeks, and might be here several more, and they shouldn’t need to pretend. “You don’t have to do that, you know.”  
  
Bucky looks confused, but she can tell Steve understands what she’s saying. She watches as he turns the idea over in his mind, and then he moves closer to Bucky again. His hand falls off his own leg and lands on the couch between them. Steve stills, leaving the rest up to Bucky.  
  
As he changes the subject, and they chat casually for a few minutes, she notices Bucky’s hand move slowly to the cushion between their thighs, and inch over until the backs of their hands are touching. It’s a tiny thing, a gesture more than anything, but it has her smiling to himself as she leaves the room with her snack.  
  
* * *  
  
  
_The man begs._  
  
_He’s speaking a language the Soldier doesn’t understand, rapid and cloying. On his knees, hands clasped before him, tears streaming down his cheeks. Pleading for his life, pleading to be spared._  
  
_The Soldier doesn’t pay any mind to it. He follows orders. The trigger is easier to pull than the blood splatter will be to clean off the white plaster wall._  
  
“You with me?”  
  
Bucky looks up. Steve is across the bedroom, frowning at him. Bucky inhales and shakes his head and pastes on a smile.  
  
“Yeah, I’m good. Sorry, were you saying something?”  
  
“No. You just looked …” Whatever he’s about to say dies on his tongue before it passes his lips. Steve tosses the washcloth he’d been holding back towards the bathroom and walks over. He’s in grey sweatpants and a white tank-top that leaves very little to the imagination. Bucky remembers him small so fondly. He’d loved that skinny, sickly spitfire so much. More than Steve ever believed, even though Bucky always told him.  
  
Steve sits next to him on the edge of the bed, reaching out to brush stray hairs away from Bucky’s cheek. Bucky smiles at him again, and this time it’s genuine. Steve is so golden. Bucky’s spent months questioning whether he deserves the forgiveness and absolution Steve has offered him, but desperate to cling to his light, in the hopes that it might shine out some of Bucky’s lingering darkness.  
  
“I’m okay,” he promises Steve. It’s not entirely a lie. It’s just not entirely the truth, either.  
  
Steve nods. He lifts Bucky’s chin with a bent finger and presses a soft kiss to his lips. His mouth tastes like toothpaste, when Bucky parts his lips to let Steve in. Steve’s fingers go into his hair, a comforting and familiar touch, and Bucky wraps his hand around the back of Steve’s neck to pull him closer.  
  
He wants so badly to fall back onto the mattress and lose himself in Steve, but can’t. Reluctantly, he lets their lips part. “Gotta take over from Natasha in a few minutes. My night.”  
  
“I know.” Steve presses another kiss to the corner of Bucky’s mouth. “Can I sit with you, for a bit?”  
  
Bucky nods. “‘Course.”  
  
In the War Room, Natasha catches them up on a few minor developments and leaves them with notes she’s been taking by hand on a yellow legal pad. She smiles at them and pats Bucky on the shoulder as she leaves the room, leaves them alone with the screens surrounding them and the base below them through the transparent floor. Bucky goes to the platform, scrolling thought a few camera feeds and finding no activity inside the compound. Steve sits on the floor, sliding down against the wall, and looks down at the roof underneath. When Bucky looks over, Steve holds his hand out, and Bucky goes to it, taking it and sitting beside him.  
  
Steve slouches a little further down the wall so he can lean over and rest his head on Bucky’s shoulder. Bucky wraps his arms around him, holding Steve against his chest, nosing through his hair. “You should sleep, if you’re tired. I’ll be alright.”  
  
“I will,” Steve answers. “Not quite yet.”  
  
“I’m not going to shatter if you leave me alone for a few hours.”  
  
Steve lifts his head, a frown twisting his forehead. “That’s not what I’m doing. I just wanted to be with you.”  
  
“Oh.” Bucky kisses him as an apology, and then Steve’s head goes back against his shoulder. He’s warm, tucked against Bucky’s side, and the smell of his skin reminds Bucky of warm nights in Brooklyn, and Wakanda.  
  
“Love you,” Steve says to him, nose running along the column of Bucky’s throat.  
  
“Me too,” Bucky whispers back.  
  
* * *  
  
  
Barnes offers to be the one who stays behind on the airship watching the screens and the heat sensors, while the rest of them descend down into the base to get the blueprints. He says it’s because his was the last night-watch, so he isn’t as rested as the others and doesn’t want to risk making a sleep-deprived mistake on the ground. The others readily agree. Sam doesn’t buy it. After two years on the run, Barnes must be used to sleep deprivation. Sam doesn’t bring it up, because it isn’t the right time to do so, but he suspects it has a lot more to do with Barnes’ earlier admission that he thinks he’s been here before. Maybe he’s worried memories will come flooding back if he’s physically inside the compound. Or maybe he already remembers more than he’ll admit. Sam would like to think Steve would keep them filled in, if Bucky had told him anything important, but he isn’t sure he buys that anymore either. Every day he suspects a little more that Steve is keeping something from them.  
  
They’ve tracked and mapped out the regular movements of the night guards, on their regular shifts from midnight to 6 AM when everyone else is asleep. There are six regular guards; one stationed at each of the four entrances, and two more in a room filled with screens attached to a network of security cameras. They’ve named them, and memorized their faces, and Natasha spent a few hours with one of their own cameras zoomed in on those screens, mapping out potential blind spots. Deciding there aren’t enough to risk it, Steve will jam the connection with a signal interrupter on the roof above the surveillance room, and while their communications are down Natasha will sneak into the room where they’ve determined the plans are kept. Sam will circle the compound in the air, ready to take out any of the guards if he needs to but hoping he won’t because it will blow their cover, and waiting to extract the others and fly them back up.  
  
He flies Steve and Natasha down one at a time; Steve first, setting him up on the roof, and then Natasha. On Sam’s command through their earpieces, Steve jams the signals.  
  
“Static,” Barnes confirms, watching the screens from above them. “Go.”  
  
Natasha climbs athletically through an open window, and Sam loses sight of her. He can only see Steve, perched on the rooftop, leaning against a massive airduct to remain out of sight.  
  
“Are you following her?” Steve asks, pressing a finger to his earpiece to make sure he’s heard.  
  
Barnes doesn’t answer.  
  
“Bucky?” Steve tries again, and Sam panics when the line is still silent.  
  
“Barnes!” he says, louder than he probably should given he isn’t circling that far above the facility.  
  
A sharp inhale over the line, and Barnes swears. “Sorry, what?”  
  
“Do you have eyes on Natasha?” Sam repeats angrily.  
  
“Yeah, she’s still in the hallway but moving quickly. Goatee and Nine Fingers are still in the room, messing with wires. The others haven’t moved, they don’t know anything’s happening.”  
  
Sam takes another lap, scouting for other places Natasha could exit if their plan goes awry.  
  
“Is it getting worse?” Steve asks. “Since we’ve been here?”  
  
Sam hears Barnes sigh. It sends crinkly static over the line.  
  
“Bucky.”  
  
“Maybe,” Barnes’ voice admits, quietly, unhappily.  
  
Steve’s turn to sigh. “Why didn’t you tell me that?”  
  
“Is now really the best time for this?” Barnes asks. He’s right, it isn’t, and Sam’s at least grateful one of them is smart enough to point that out.  
  
A quiet bang rings out in the distance, Sam looks up sharply and loses their conversation for a few minutes as he glances around himself, insuring his position hasn’t been compromised. When he settles back in the air above the window, his attention turns back in to the men still arguing in hushed but heated tones over the earpieces.  
  
“– if you don’t talk to me?” Steve is saying.  
  
“I’m trying, Steve,” Barnes answers. Something sad creeps into his voice.  
  
A scuffle can be heard, and Sam perks up, panicked again. “Shit, was that Nat?”  
  
“I’m fine, hold your position!” Natasha says tersely into three sets of ears.  
  
Sam hears the rough sounds of someone moving, and looks down to see Steve ducking out from behind the airduct. He’s about to repeat Natasha’s orders but Barnes beats him to it.  
  
“Park it, Rogers!” Barnes growls.  
  
Steve swears, but listens. They wait in tense silence for the longest 45 seconds of Sam’s life. He watches Steve put his head down, banging it against the duct, and knows the ache to leap into action is coursing through Steve’s veins. He can never let them handle anything, always needs to jump in and take over, even when his help isn’t so helpful. Sam can usually equate that to Steve being selfless and brave and caring. At the moment, it just pisses him off. It’s been a few long months of Steve making unilateral decisions and Sam swallowing his frustration for the sake of keeping the peace. Natasha is the most capable of any of them for this particular mission. She isn’t a damsel needing to be rescued.  
  
“Got it, on my way back,” her voice finally says.  
  
“Go get her, I’ll flip the switch back as soon as you’re clear,” Steve orders, breaking out his full Captain America voice, looking up at Sam from the roof. Sam resists the urge to roll his eyes. That was the plan all along, he doesn’t need Steve reminding him.  
  
Sam swoops down silently, and Natasha appears back at the window, climbing out and dropping gracefully to the ground. Sam wraps his arms around her waist and lifts her, flying back up. Barnes flashes a light down for him to follow, and Sam manages to find the invisible airship and hoist Natasha up through the loading bay. Barnes reaches for her hand with his metal one and pulls her in, and Sam flies back down for Steve.  
  
Natasha helps them in, and they find Barnes back in the War Room, watching the guards in the surveillance room looking at their once again working screens. The two men look relieved, more than upset, as if they know they’d have been in trouble if they couldn’t get the cameras running again and will take the secret of the 90-second glitch to their grave. It should be a moment of celebration, but it can’t be, because they all know, now. They know Barnes is disassociating, and that it’s getting worse. Sam was right, and Steve should have done something about it a long time ago, and it could have put all of them in danger. It still might. Steve is staring imploringly at Barnes, and Barnes refuses to look at anyone, and Sam knows he probably looks furious. Because he is.  
  
“I got it,” Natasha says, after a moment of thick silence. She pulls the tiny camera from a pocket in her tactical suit and transfers the images to the platform.  
  
Sam doesn’t bother looking at them. They’ll have to wait until at least the morning to take further action anyway. He just leaves, turning on his heel and walking silently from the room.  
  
* * *  
  
  
She spends most of the next day and night in the War Room, poring over the plans she photographed, trying to make sense of them and trying to figure out what sort of metaphorical wrench they could throw into them to buy themselves time to work out how to deal with everything else. The agents at the compound still speak largely in code, as if they know they’re being watched, and Natasha hasn’t managed to completely crack it. She has an ever-expanding list of new words and theories as to what they might mean, but isn’t confident in any of it. Certainly not confident enough to launch a strike based on what could be wholly false assumptions.  
  
The mood on the airship has changed, after close to three weeks trapped on it together. Maybe they’re just getting cabin fever. Cooped up and starting to be sick of each other. She doesn’t entirely know what’s going on between Steve and Sam, why Sam is suddenly irritable and Steve is suddenly guilt-stricken. It has something to do with Bucky, and an increase in his trauma symptoms. Natasha doesn’t ask. It’s their drama, and she has more important things to do.  
  
After dinner the day after their latest trip down to the base, Sam’s expression is dark and his eyes are sharply watching, looking back and forth between Steve and Bucky so often it even gets under Natasha’s skin, and she isn’t the one being scrutinized. Finally Steve snaps, turning to Sam and loudly asking, “is there something you wanna say?”  
  
“Do I need to?” Sam returns, just as agitated.  
  
Steve glares at him, but Bucky stops it from escalating.  
  
“Steve,” he says, quietly, waiting until Steve looks at him and then communicating paragraphs between them with their eyes. Natasha is a little stunned, as she usually is, that they can do that.  
  
Sam doesn’t wait around to find out what they’re silently saying to each other. He dumps his dishes into the sink and leaves the room, managing not to slam the door behind him, but probably just barely.  
  
Bucky takes a step closer, and then hesitates. Steve completes the decision for him, reaching out and smoothing his hand over Bucky’s hair. “It isn’t your fault,” he says, gently.  
  
Bucky frowns and exhales slowly. Then he remembers Natasha is still standing there, and moves awkwardly toward the refrigerator, trying to pretend the tender moment she’d just witnessed hadn’t happened at all. Steve doesn’t bother with the pretense. He just keeps looking at Bucky, blue eyes shiny and mouth downturned, like his heart is broken. Natasha isn’t sure she’s ever seen him look so sad.  
  
Without another word, Steve walks past her and out of the kitchen. Bucky fidgets by the fridge, the tension still palpable in the room, and Natasha can’t leave it alone because there is enough uranium 30 feet below them to kill millions of innocent people and in-fighting can’t be left to fester if it might cost lives.  
  
“Do we need to deal with this?” she asks. “Whatever this is?”  
  
Bucky opens his mouth on another sigh, and shifts his gaze down to the floor between them. He shakes his head. “It is my fault.”  
  
“I’m sure that’s not true.”  
  
He shrugs listlessly.  
  
Rather than harp on the point, she nods her head toward the door. “Come with me, I want to show you something.”  
  
Bucky follows her back to the War Room, where she’s already set up more lists and rough sketches of theory to keep her occupied on her night-shift this evening. “They’ll need hydrogen,” she says, showing him the images of the plans on the platform and briefly explaining how a nuclear weapon functions. “I don’t think they have that yet. And more drums, to hold the waste.”  
  
“Waste?”  
  
“Nuclear fission creates radioactive waste. It has to be stored properly or it’s really dangerous. Usually in bright yellow containers with black triangles on them, so they aren’t mistaken for something else.”  
  
“We haven’t seen any yellow containers,” Bucky muses, looking across the room at their list of delivered materials. Their tracking of the trucks hasn’t been particularly fruitful; they don’t often go back to the same locations more than once.  
  
“That delivery is probably our best bet to disrupt, if that’s still the plan. Knocking over a truck carrying canisters of hydrogen in it isn’t the best idea.”  
  
“The future is kinda terrible,” Bucky says, and Natasha frowns at him before she notices the small smile on his face and realizes he’s joking. Or at least mostly joking. Adding levity to it to cover for how much he really means it.  
  
“Yeah.” She laughs and shakes her head. “I’m sure it is.”  
  
“I’d like to say at least you don’t have Nazis …”  
  
She gestures below their feet. “But we still have Nazis.”  
  
“And now they have giant bombs.”  
  
“Well, not yet, they don’t. And they won’t, if we have anything to say about it.”  
  
Bucky nods. He gets that lost, forlorn look on his face again as he stares down at the transparent floor underneath his shoes. “Steve was right, wasn’t he? I shouldn’t be here.”  
  
Natasha leans back against the platform and crosses her arms over her chest, considering the question and choosing her words carefully. It crosses her mind that Bucky _wouldn’t _be here if she hadn’t gone behind Steve’s back, and her own actions still don’t sit right in her gut. Twinges of guilt prickle at her now and then, when she can see Bucky struggling. Eventually, she says, “I think you shouldn’t let anyone tell you how well you’re coping, or how to feel about the stuff that’s going on in your own head. Even Steve. You know how you’re handling things better than anyone else does. Trust your instincts.”  
  
“My instincts are all over the place. That’s part of the problem.”  
  
“If you want to go back to Wakanda, we’ll take you,” she tells him. Guilt ping-pongs through her chest again. “You don’t have to be here just because I asked you to be.”   
  
He looks at her, clear blue eyes turned warm in the glow from the screens around them.  
  
Natasha sees so many of the things Steve’s told her about Bucky in his face. He’s undeniably handsome, wide-set eyes and tanned skin and a smile that lights up his entire face, even though just now he isn’t smiling. His hair is long and his beard isn’t neatly groomed but she’s seen pictures of him from the 1940s, when he’d been clean-shaven and styled, with a devastating grin and boyish charm bursting through the still image. His current appearance gives him a wild look, and yet somehow more vulnerable, without the sheen of dapper perfection to hide behind. In moments where he’s let his guard down, Steve’s told her stories of Bucky in Brooklyn; popular with the girls, adored by everyone else, loyal and kind and charming. She can see all that in him, but sees everything else, too. All the shadows Hydra left on him. The scars, from years of torture. The internal kind, that never fully heal. She knows those kind of scars. They stop actively bleeding, eventually, but the marks they leave behind last for a lifetime.  
  
“Why are you so nice to me?” Bucky asks, as if he’s genuinely curious. As if it surprises him, every time someone treats him with kindness. Stuck perpetually in believing he’s deserving of punishment for the things Hydra made him do. She knows from experience that emotional self-flagellation doesn’t help.  
  
“Why wouldn’t I be?” She shrugs, to cover the way it tugs at her heartstrings. In truth, she understands him a lot more than he knows. She’s just never been any good at talking about it.  
  
Bucky doesn’t answer. He tugs a chair over and sits in it, resting his arms on the platform in front of them. Hair falls across his face as he looks down at the screen. Natasha brings up the heat sensor, and they watch in silence for a few minutes as small orange figures wander the halls, and sit motionless in rooms, and one paces in what they think is an office.  
  
After a while, Bucky clears his throat, and without looking up, asks, “Steve told you, about me and him?”  
  
“He did,” Natasha confirms.  
  
Bucky nods slowly.  
  
“Is that a problem?”  
  
He doesn’t respond.  
  
Natasha uses her fingers to zoom the screen in on the pacing figure, moving steadily back and forth. “What d’you think he’s so agitated about?”  
  
“No idea.” After another beat, he says, “no, it’s not a problem. I mean, you’re his friend. He can tell you whatever he wants.”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
Bucky looks up at her, cringing a little. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”  
  
Natasha swallows. Debates how much to reveal to someone she still doesn’t know very well. Then remembers she trusts Steve more than anyone other than Clint, and Steve trusts Bucky. “Did you know I was an assassin?”  
  
Blue eyes widen. “What?”  
  
“I was born in Russia, near the end of the Soviet Union. Recruited by the KGB into their spy network when I was just a kid.”  
  
“How did you end up with SHIELD?”  
  
“That’s … a long and not particularly interesting story. Point is, I know a little of what you’re going through. It’s not the same, I wasn’t brainwashed. I made choices, you didn’t. But I was – I guess, indoctrinated is a better word. And I’m different now, at least I’m trying to be. But I still have to carry the things I did.”  
  
The breath he takes is slow, controlled, and blown quietly out of his nose. He resumes staring down at the screen. Natasha waits, unsure if she’s made a mistake, until he speaks in a soft voice.  
  
“I see them every time I close my eyes. The people I killed. I keep thinking it has to stop one day, but it isn’t. I just keep remembering new things, and reliving it all over again.”  
  
“I get that,” she says honestly. “I’m not gonna give you some cheerful speech about how it gets better. I don’t know how it’s gonna go for you, from here. But I think you’re doing the best you can. And that’s all you can do.”  
  
“We could never tell anyone,” Bucky says. “Me and Steve. I’ve never told anyone. Ever. My family never knew. We think maybe some of the guys in our unit suspected during the war but they didn’t know for sure. The only other person who really knows is Shuri and that’s ‘cause she was in my head.”  
  
“That sounds lonely.”  
  
“It’s just how it was, back then. We didn’t know any different. This is only the second time in my life I’ve ever had a conversation about it with someone who isn’t Steve.”  
  
She raises an eyebrow. “How is it?”  
  
He laughs a little. “Weird. But kinda nice, I guess.”  
  
“Good.”  
  
* * *  
  
  
The television is on, but Steve isn’t really watching it. He’s just sitting on the couch in front of it, staring unseeing at the screen, trying to let the colors and noises distract him sufficiently but they don’t. Everything is falling apart, right at the exact time they need things to hold firm. It terrifies to him think Bucky’s getting worse. Scares him right down to his bones, and leaves him feeling handcuffed because he doesn’t have the first clue what he could possibly do about it. As has become the norm since he discovered Bucky was still alive, Steve drowns in a sea of wanting so badly to help him, to heal him, to save him, and he can’t.  
  
A body appears in the doorway, and Steve looks up to see Bucky leaning against the frame of it and looking at him. It’s still strange to see him in modern, casual clothes. His regular uniform from their apartment in Brooklyn of slacks and a white undershirt would be familiar, and Steve had grown used to his Wakandan robes. Seeing him in basketball shorts and a hooded sweatshirt, borrowed from Steve, makes him almost look like someone Steve doesn’t know. But only almost. There will never be a day where he doesn’t recognize Bucky’s face, even if it’s bearded and surrounded by the stray strands of hair that have fallen out from the hair-tie that holds the rest of it back.  
  
Steve leans his head back onto the top of the couch and tries to smile. It likely comes out a grimace instead.  
  
Bucky walks over to him, sitting next to Steve on the couch and putting an arm around him. Steve leans gratefully into him, letting Bucky take his weight, letting his warmth and his familiar scent soothe him like a hot shower. Given their roles and their histories, an outsider might naturally assume Steve is always the strong one and Bucky the one in need of care and comfort. There are times when that’s the case. But not always. Sometimes Steve feels like he’s been fighting since the moment Erskine put the serum into his veins. Sometimes Steve is _tired_, and the responsibility on his shoulders is too heavy to carry and it crushes him. Sometimes sinking into Bucky’s arms is the only place he finds a moment to exhale.  
  
“M’sorry,” he murmurs, pushing his face into Bucky’s neck. The bristles of his beard tickle Steve’s nose.  
  
“What for?” Bucky asks.  
  
Steve shrugs. “Guess I don’t know, exactly. I’m sorry you’re struggling. I’m sorry I can’t help. I’m sorry Sam’s pissed at us, it isn’t fair that it’s landing on you.”  
  
Bucky sighs. He lifts a leg and drapes his thigh over Steve’s, shifting in closer to him. He cradles Steve in his arms, and Steve remembers how perfectly he used to fit in this spot, when he was small. He still fits if they try, but not the way he used to. What he has now is everything he’d wanted, back then. To be big, and strong, and powerful, and healthy. He just didn’t realize what he’d be giving up.  
  
“It isn’t your job to save the entire world by yourself,” Bucky tells him, his voice loving. “Or to take the blame for everything that goes wrong so no one else has to.”  
  
Steve blinks up at him, and Bucky presses a slow kiss to his lips.  
  
From across the room, a low voice mutters, “Jesus Christ. I fucking knew it.”  
  
* * *


	6. Whiplash

For a moment, Steve swears his heart stops. Cold dread runs through him, like icy rivers along the pathways of his veins. He can’t look up. He’s paralyzed in Bucky’s arms, feels the burn of Sam looking at them from the doorway but can’t force his muscles to move.  
  
Bucky swears quietly, turning to face him, while Steve panics and wants to hide in Bucky’s arms forever and never, ever face him. This is so completely not the way this should have happened. He’s been trying for months to find the right time to bring it up so Sam _wouldn’t _find out this way, and now he has, when he was already angry with Steve for keeping other things from him. Steve’s heart and stomach sink, dragging him down through the floor, through the ground, settling somewhere around the center of the earth where the heat is just about enough to match his shame.  
  
“Sam,” Bucky starts.  
  
“_Sam_? We’re on a first-name basis suddenly? How about you call me Falcon, since I have to call you Sergeant Barnes and apparently I don’t know anything about you.”  
  
“That’s not –” Bucky retorts, but Steve finally finds his spine and interjects. The last thing this moment needs is the two of them bickering about something that doesn’t matter.  
  
“Buck,” he says. “Could you give us a minute?”  
  
Bucky looks at him, and Steve nods. Still, he hesitates, glancing toward the door and then back at Steve, before he moves. One corner of his mouth curves into a sympathetic half-smile, and he presses a kiss to Steve’s forehead before he leaves them. Steve watches him go, watches Sam glaring at him before he rounds back to Steve and Steve looks him in the eyes. His accusing stare, from dark eyes that are usually so kind, makes Steve feel like he’s no more than ten inches tall.  
  
“How long?” Sam asks, as soon as the door closes behind Bucky.  
  
Steve scrubs his hands over his face and stands on shaky legs. “Does that matter?”  
  
“Yeah, it does. Because if it’s a thing that just happened the other night for the first time because you were drunk or lonely or something that’s one thing, but if it’s been going on for a while and you never said anything?”  
  
It’s entirely the wrong way to respond, but what comes out of Steve’s mouth is, “I can’t get drunk.”  
  
“So it’s the second one, then. Its _been_ a thing.”  
  
Steve’s heart is going too fast and it’s making him lightheaded, nerves and fears all jumbling up and leaving him sick to his stomach. It feels a bit like jumping off a cliff without a parachute to even consider being honest in his answer, but that’s what Sam deserves and Steve would hate himself if he took the easy way out of this. “Since before the war.”  
  
Sam nods shortly, jaw clenching and a muscle twitching in his temple.  
  
“Obviously with a pretty long gap in the middle,” Steve continues, and then wishes he hadn’t said anything when Sam laughs humorlessly twice and shakes his head.  
  
“When you were in Wakanda, that first time. You said you were just gonna go and check on him after he woke up but then you were gone for like a _month_ while Nat and I struggled to run missions without you, and I … I’m so stupid. I thought maybe you were having some kind of identity crisis after everything that went down with Stark and the Avengers. Never fucking occurred to me you were lying on a beach with your version of a honey all that time.”  
  
The accusation stings, wounds Steve deeper than his skin, and he wants to recoil from it, to defend himself, to protest that it wasn’t exactly a five-star vacation, being in Wakanda with Bucky and dealing every day with the fallout and the flashbacks and the lingering trauma. He doesn’t do any of that. And he never knew Sam and Natasha had trouble on missions when he wasn’t with them. He should have known it, but he didn’t. Maybe he didn’t want to.  
  
“I thought your judgment was compromised when it came to him because he was your _friend_. But this? You’re putting us at risk, Steve, all of us!” Sam cries. “Including him! Because you want your damn boyfriend to be here!”  
  
“That’s not true!” Steve protests, and it isn’t; of all the things he can be fairly accused of, that isn’t one of them. “I didn’t want him here either! Natasha did!”  
  
“You should have stopped it!”  
  
“I _tried_ to stop it! She went behind my back and told him about it and then he wanted to come along! I thought it was a bad idea right from the start, but what was I supposed to do?”  
  
“You could have told him no! You’re our leader, you didn’t have to let him come! You know what the worst part is?” Sam asks. It’s angry, and rhetorical, and Steve is smart enough not to answer. “Part of me really did know. Or suspected, anyway. The way you’d talk about him. When we were all in Wakanda, the fact that you always stayed with him in his sad little hut while me and Nat stayed in nice cushy rooms at the palace. The way you _looked _at him, especially when you thought Nat and I wouldn’t notice.”  
  
“Sam,” Steve says weakly.  
  
“It all added up, except for one thing. The fact that we’re friends, and you hadn’t told me about it. I figured, alright, yeah this sure looks like somethin’ but Steve would have _told _me if it was something, so it must not be.”  
  
“Sam, I’m … sorry. I know this changes things.”  
  
“I’m not mad that you’re fucking him, dumbass.” Sam aims another cold glare at him, this time paired with a look of incredulity like Steve is the biggest idiot on the planet and he’d like to punch some sense into him. “I’m mad that you didn’t tell me.”  
  
Steve nods. He’s mad about that too, and he really doesn’t have a good excuse for it. “I should have.”  
  
“Yeah, you fucking should have.” Sam looks at him, and the anger in his dark eyes melts to hurt, that Steve put there, and he’s furious with himself. “Why didn’t you?”  
  
Steve wishes he had a better answer than, “I don’t know.”  
  
“Look, I know the military isn’t always so cool about people who are … but you and me? I thought …” Sam trails off, being careful about it but still unable to hide the upset in his voice. He walks a few steps closer and collapses onto a sofa chair, frowning at his hands clasped in his lap.  
  
The pit in Steve’s stomach worsens. He sits back down on the couch, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “I guess I never figured out how to bring it up. Kinda hard between finding out he’s alive but doesn’t remember me, and then having everything fall apart the way it did, to find a good time to say, hey, by the way …”  
  
“Things didn’t fall apart for two years after you found out he was alive,” Sam points out, his tone still accusing but a little gentler, and Steve deserves that. “You and I spent two years looking for him, Steve. I followed you around the damn world trying to locate him. I risked my _life_ to go after him with you, I am wanted for treason because I took your side against Stark and the rest of them. And yeah, it was also about the Accords, but it was _mostly _about him, and don’t lie to me, you know that’s the truth. Everything I put on the line, all to help you track down a psychotic robot assassin that you kept calling _Bucky _while he tried to end your life, and in all that time you couldn’t find a minute to mention this?”  
  
“You’re right. That was a shitty excuse.”  
  
“Did you really think I wouldn’t be okay with it?”  
  
Steve closes his eyes, swallowing over the burn of shame in his throat, and forces himself to admit, “I don’t come from a time when it was okay for me and him to be … who we are. I didn’t want it to change how you look at me. You’re different from the rest of them to me, you gotta know that.”  
  
“Different how?”  
  
“Because of everything you just said. The only reason you got into all this in the first place is for me. Because you were willing to help me when I needed it, even though it puts your life in danger every time and you don’t have to. You believed me right away when I said Bucky was innocent. You’re the only one who did. You didn’t even know him, you were just on board because I asked for your help. That means everything to me, I didn’t want to risk messing it up.”  
  
“You could’a made it up to me by not lying to me, for years,” Sam says, but his tone is softer now. More understanding. When Steve chances a glance up at him, there’s a small smile on his face.  
  
“If it helps at all, this wasn’t the reason I wanted to go after him. I loved him when we were kids but I thought he was dead until two years ago. It wasn’t about that.”  
  
“I know that. I’m not saying I regret helping you, alright? You were right, he was a victim and bringing him in was the right thing to do. Even if he is a bit of a dick sometimes.”  
  
Steve smiles, and relief washes over him like cool water.  
  
“Is it real?” Sam asks quietly. “Like, it isn’t just …?”  
  
Steve nods, without a trace of embarrassment. “Yeah. I love him. Always have.”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
“I’m sorry,” Steve says again. “I really, really should have told you.”  
  
“I guess I can see why you didn’t. The world’s changed a lot since your time, but. Maybe not that much. And not everybody. I get that more than some people would.”  
  
He doesn’t say it but Steve understands he means because of the color of his skin, and he’s again ashamed he never considered that when worrying it would change things between them if Sam knew.  
  
“Who else knows?”  
  
“Natasha. But I didn’t tell her, she figured it out.”  
  
Sam huffs and laughs at himself. “Of course she did. She’s smarter than me.”  
  
“She’s a spy,” Steve points out. “Her life kinda depends on her being observant.”  
  
“I’ll pretend that makes me feel better.”  
  
“Thank you for understanding,” Steve tells him sincerely, looking over and trying to smile so Sam knows how much he means it.  
  
“I don’t know if you’ve picked up on this, but you’re kinda my best friend. Sucks a little that I didn’t get to celebrate with you when the love of your life came back from the dead, but maybe I can now.”  
  
“I’m not sure I deserve you.”  
  
“You definitely don’t,” Sam agrees, grinning back. “What about him? Is he good enough for you?”  
  
Warmth blooms in Steve’s chest at the idea of someone caring whether he’s being treated well. He’s not sure anyone but Bucky ever has before. “Yes.”  
  
“Good.”  
  
“He’s always been there. You know? He cared about me when I was skinny and sick all the time. When I had nothing, when I _was_ nothing, I was something to him. There aren’t many people who really see me, for the person I am behind the shield. He’s one of them.”  
  
“You know I’m one of them too, yeah?”  
  
“Yeah, I do.”  
  
“Good,” Sam says again. “Now, what are we gonna do about his episodes?”  
  
Steve’s heart skinks right back down, and he leans back against the cushions, staring up at the white ceiling for answers. It has none for him. “I really don’t know. He says he’s got it under control.”  
  
“Do you believe him?”  
  
“I believe he’s trying to have it under control.”  
  
“Yeah, I believe that, too. Doesn’t mean he’s right, though.”  
  
“I know.” Steve rubs his eyes with the heels of his palms, and repeats it, helplessly. “I know.”  
  
* * *

  
Steve only fills him in marginally, when they’re finally alone again in Steve’s bedroom, and Bucky doesn’t push for details. He doesn’t really need them. As long as he hasn’t ruined Steve’s friendship with Wilson, the nuances aren’t important. The next morning they’re back on the couch, when Wilson enters the room unexpectedly like he had the night before. Steve removes himself from Bucky’s arms and sits up, but Bucky doesn’t bother moving. He stays where he is, relaxed and reclined against the cushions. He could care less what Wilson thinks. But Steve cares.  
  
Wilson eyes them, his mouth moving like he’s going to say something and then decides on saying something else. “You don’t gotta put on a show for me. At ease, soldier.”  
  
Steve doesn’t answer, and Wilson busies himself in the kitchen, grabbing a loaf of bread and fishing out a piece to pop into the toaster. When his back is turned, Steve looks over his shoulder at Bucky, questioning. Bucky doesn’t know if this is a test, or a trick, or what, but he’s too tired to mind either way at the moment. He’d barely slept, last night. The nightmares are increasing again, along with everything else that seems to be spiraling out of his control. He shrugs, indicating what they do next is up to Steve.  
  
With one more quick glance toward the kitchen, where Wilson is taking the peanut butter from the fridge and still largely ignoring them, Steve lays back again, his head on Bucky’s shoulder and his arm over Bucky’s middle. As Wilson leaves, he glances over and makes brief eye contact with Bucky over the top of Steve’s head. His expression is difficult to read. Their eyes lock just for a moment before he’s gone, but Bucky is left feeling like something important just happened.  
  
Later in the afternoon, he finds Wilson in the War Room. Bucky brings him coffee in a thermal mug, with milk and sugar like he’s noticed Wilson takes it, because he’s been watching the screens all day and could probably use a pick-me-up. Wilson narrows his eyes suspiciously as he takes the mug from Bucky.  
  
“I promise I didn’t poison it,” Bucky says, holding up his flesh hand like he’s swearing an oath.  
  
“That’s reassuring,” Wilson quips, but he does sip from the mug.  
  
“Anything new?” Bucky asks, gesturing at the screens.  
  
“Nothing. They’ve done jack shit all day. It’s like they’re waiting for something.”  
  
“Could we talk, then?”  
  
Wilson eyes him warily. “‘Bout what?”  
  
“I think maybe I owe you an apology.”  
  
“You have my attention. What for?”  
  
A response doesn’t immediately pop into Bucky’s head, and he laughs at himself. “I don’t know, exactly. I guess I feel like we got off on the wrong foot, and it would be easier on everyone if we were a little nicer to each other, and I figured maybe apologizing was a good first step.”  
  
“Not if you haven’t done anything you need to be sorry for,” Wilson says, with a characteristic eye-roll, but it’s more exasperated than annoyed and that still feels like a move in the right direction.  
  
“Have I?” Bucky asks, genuinely wanting to know.  
  
After a beat, Wilson replies, “No. Not really.”  
  
Bucky nods. “You and I are a lot more alike than we are different, you know.”  
  
“How so?”  
  
“We both served. We both lost someone important.”  
  
“Steve told you about that?” Wilson asks, with a prickly look on his face.  
  
“Was he not supposed to?”  
  
“I guess I never explicitly told him not to.” Another eye-roll.  
  
“We both know what that’s like, is my point. To be in a war. And I think we’re both here now because we’re looking to make up for some things.”  
  
Wilson nods slowly. “There’s some truth in that.”  
  
“And we both care about Steve.”  
  
“I do care about Steve. I don’t want him getting hurt.”  
  
The _you better not fucking hurt him_ doesn’t need to be spoken out loud; in hangs in the air between them anyway. Bucky promises, “I don’t either.”  
  
Movement on one of the screens catches Wilson’s eye, and he steps a few feet away from Bucky to examine it. A few red human figures move around on the screen displaying the heat sensor, but they don’t appear to be doing anything of consequence, so he only watches for a moment or two before turning back.  
  
“Thanks for this,” he says, holding the mug up before sipping from it again.  
  
Bucky nods at him. “Yeah, no problem.”  
  
“Mind if I ask you something?”  
  
“Sure.”  
  
“What were you doin’ all that time, before we found you in Bucharest?”  
  
Bucky licks his lips and breathes slowly. He doesn’t like to think about those two years if he can help it. The memories creep back in no matter how hard he tries to keep them at bay, but he does try. They were lonely and isolated, and he spent so much of them confused and horrified of the things he was remembering and terrified his captors were about to kick in his door at any moment and drag him back. “Not much, to be honest. Just tried to survive, tried not to get caught.”  
  
“What did you do for money?”  
  
Bucky doesn’t answer right away.  
  
“Oh,” Wilson says, realizing.  
  
“Not like I could get a job.” Bucky’s gaze shifts down to his hands, folded together on the platform edge in front of him, metal thumb picking at a hangnail on his flesh hand. “I’m wanted for murder all over the world. And according to the U.S. government, James Barnes died over 70 years ago. Technically I don’t exist.”  
  
Wilson shrugs. “You were doing what you had to do. To survive. No one would blame you for that.”  
  
“I never took from a person,” Bucky says, his eyes fixing on Wilson’s again. It’s really important that he knows that. He realizes he’s never told Steve that, either. He should. “Not even once. I wasn’t a pick-pocket, I took from ATMs and McDonalds and shit, places that could afford the loss.”  
  
Wilson nods. “That doesn’t surprise me.”  
  
“No?”  
  
“No. Steve wouldn’t have loved you all these years unless you were a good person.”  
  
Bucky looks back down at his hands, to cover for the way that makes him want to smile and cry all at the same time. “Do I really have to call you Falcon?”  
  
A quiet laugh, and Wilson grins at him. “Nah. Sam is fine.”  
  
“Steve told me it was mostly you looking for me, those two years. That you offered, you wanted to help him, even though you didn’t know me.”  
  
“I’d do it again. Steve’s a good man. People drop everything to help him because he’d do the same for them.”  
  
“He’s always been like that.” Bucky smiles at him; tries to make it sincere, because it is. “Thank you, for looking out for him. He needs that. He isn’t always so good about taking care of himself.”  
  
“You don’t say,” Sam jokes.  
  
“You think between the two of us, we can manage it?”  
  
“I’d say so, yeah.”  
  
* * *  
  
_The one place Steve never seemed to mind feeling small was in Bucky’s arms. Usually he tried to hide it, stuffing his shoes or standing impossibly straight, or trying to disappear in a crowd so he wouldn’t be noticed. Some days Steve’s too tired to fight back, and the mocking gets under his skin. But when he’s in Bucky’s arms, he seems okay with being thin and slight and he scrunches up to make himself even smaller so Bucky can cuddle him like a cat._  
  
_Sometimes it’s huddled together under thin covers at night when the heat goes out, sometimes stuck up against each other on a crowded streetcar, pretending to grumble about the crowd and the cold like everyone else but Bucky wraps his arm around Steve, holding onto a handrail on the other side of him as an excuse to hug him in public. Right now, it’s sharing an armchair by the window, looking out at the early spring rain, chatting about nothing and everything, just the two of them tucked away where neither have to be something they aren’t for the benefit of people they don’t care about half as much as they care about each other.  
  
Bucky is taking up most of the chair, because he’s over six feet already and just barely 20 years old. Steve is in his lap, curled around him with his head on Bucky’s chest, and if anyone else on earth saw them like this, they’d have something to say about it, which is why they save these moments for when they’re alone in their apartment.  
  
“They say Europe is going to war again,” Steve mentions, casually like it’s a weather report.  
  
“Who says?”  
  
“I don’t know. People.”  
  
“Hopefully they’re wrong.”  
  
“Do you think we’d join?”  
  
“The country, or you and me?”  
  
Steve shrugs. “Both.”  
  
Bucky rubs his hand slowly up and down Steve’s back, the knobs of his spine bumping Bucky’s fingers. “No. To both. It isn’t our fight, whatever they’re getting into over there. And they likely wouldn’t take you, bud.”  
  
He tries to be kind about the last bit, knowing it will infuriate Steve anyway even if it’s the truth.  
  
“Hey, that’s not –” Steve begins, instantly indignant, but then his body betrays him, his lungs constricting on a watery gasp and leaving him coughing.  
  
“Breathe, slow in and out,” Bucky soothes, rubbing Steve’s back firmer, his other hand stroking Steve’s arm.  
  
“I know how to breathe,” Steve answers combatively, even as he sputters.  
  
“I know.”  
  
When Steve catches his breath, he relaxes back into Bucky’s chest so Bucky knows he isn’t angry. Still, he says, “if people are getting hurt over there we should help.”  
  
“There ain’t even a war for sure yet,” Bucky points out. “Maybe we could fight about this once there is. If there is.”  
  
Steve huffs about it, predictably, but grumbles, “fine, what would you rather talk about?”  
  
“Nothing. Let’s just sit here a while longer.”  
  
He can feel Steve smiling against his neck. He teases, “what would all your girlfriends say if they knew how much you like snuggling me?”  
  
“I don’t have any girlfriends. And if I did, I wouldn’t care what they’d say.”  
  
Steve’s responding, “oh” is soft and maybe a little unsure, but he nuzzles in closer, and Bucky closes his eyes and lets his lungs fill with the smell of Steve’s hair._  
  
“Buck,” Steve’s voice is suddenly lower and gravelly, and Bucky blinks, the warm orange glow of an overcast afternoon sky melting away to the colder steel and white of the airship’s interior. He sees Steve – new Steve, tall and broad and chiseled and constantly worried – watching him apprehensively.  
  
Bucky gives himself a shake. “Were you saying something?”  
  
Steve chews at his lower lip and frowns as his narrowed eyes sweep over Bucky’s face. Searching, always searching. “You good?”  
  
Bucky nods and stands up.  
  
“Wanna talk about it?” Steve offers, clearly not believing him.  
  
“No, it’s not …” Bucky doesn’t know how to explain it. “They aren’t always … episodes. It’s not always that serious. Sometimes I’m just thinking about something and it’s like I get stuck in the memory.”  
  
“I called your name four times.”  
  
Bucky frowns too. It is troubling, that he didn’t hear. But it’s better than the violent ones, the ones that drag him under like a riptide and terrorize him and don’t let him go. “They aren’t always bad, I guess is my point. This one was a nice memory. I’ll take it, over the other kind.”  
  
Steve nods. “Yeah. Of course. What, uh. Can I ask?”  
  
Bucky licks his lips and smiles to himself, before turning the smile to Steve. He walks over to where Steve is leaning against the kitchen counter, as he says, “just us. In Brooklyn, before the war.”  
  
“What were we doing?”  
  
“Nothing. Just being together.”  
  
Steve holds out his hand and Bucky takes it, letting Steve pull him in, slotting his body against Steve’s. Steve looks at him for a moment, with those bright, sparkling blue eyes, and then he presses a slow kiss to Bucky’s lips, falling away after a moment on a deep exhale. Kissing him has always been Bucky’s favorite thing in the world, when they’re pressed together, when Steve is close to him, when he’s tucked against Bucky’s chest where he can keep him safe. Where he can love him safely, without fear the universe is about to snatch their happiness away just as soon as they found it again.  
  
Steve is still looking at him, those piercing eyes that see right through him like they always have, and Bucky doesn’t avert his gaze. He lets Steve look, let’s him see all the things he needs to see in Bucky’s face. “What was the memory?”  
  
“We were in our living room. It was raining.” Bucky’s hands are still clutching Steve’s biceps, like they’re anchors in a storm. “In that green chair by the window, just talking about nothing. You in my lap.”  
  
“That could be one of a hundred memories.” Steve smiles fondly, like he’s picturing it. “We did that all the time.”  
  
“I remember it so vividly. You against my chest, in my arms, your smell in my nose. That’s the happiest I ever was, when you’d sit with me like that. I would’ve kept you there all day if you’d let me. I loved you so damn much.”  
  
Steve frowns, emotions crossing his handsome features. “Buck.”  
  
Bucky leans further into him, sliding his arms up around Steve’s neck, and Steve hugs him so tightly for a moment Bucky’s feet leave the floor.  
  
“Oh, sorry,” Natasha’s says from behind them. “Didn’t. Sorry.”  
  
Steve’s face lifts up from where it was buried in Bucky’s neck, and Bucky is facing away from the door so he can’t see but Natasha must perceive something in Steve’s face because her voice changes.  
  
“Oh,” she says again, but this time it’s sad instead of surprised. “Everything … alright?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“Sorry,” Bucky adds, pulling himself out of Steve’s grip to face her. “We shouldn’t be doing stuff like this out here in the common areas.”  
  
“You don’t think I care about that, right?” she asks, frowning like she’d be really bothered if he did. “Like as long as your junk remains holstered …”  
  
Steve bursts into the squeaky laugh he does when he’s embarrassed.  
  
“Can I get in on this?” She raises her eyebrows and then wiggles them.  
  
“On what?”  
  
“You think you’re the only one who needs a hug now and then, Sarge?”  
  
Bucky rolls his eyes, because she’s at least half making fun of them, but Steve reaches a hand out towards her like he had to Bucky. “C’mon.”  
  
Grinning triumphantly, she skips over to them and wraps her thin arms around them both. “Sam!” she shouts, deafening and right in Bucky’s ear. “Get in here, we’re having a group hug.”  
  
“Ow,” Bucky comments.  
  
Sam appears moments later like he’d been waiting just outside the door for permission to enter. “You’re all dorks,” he tells them with a snort, but it doesn’t stop him from enclosing the circle from the other side.  
  
Steve is laughing, and Natasha is mockingly telling them that they’re her best friends forever, and Bucky rolls his eyes again but it’s for show this time. Things had been strained between the four of them, but have improved drastically since Sam walked in on Steve and Bucky kissing on the couch. Bucky doesn’t really understand how all that built up tension could have just dissipated overnight, but he isn’t complaining. He barely remembers what it’s like, to have friends. If it feels like this, maybe he could get used to it.  
  
* * *  
  
  
“So now I’m in his Ma’s kitchen waiting for him to come, and all the while he’s stuck out on the fire escape in his underwear,” Bucky is saying, grinning from ear to ear.  
  
“You didn’t let me in!” Steve cries.  
  
“I didn’t hear you!” Bucky chuckles. He turns back to Sam, and adds, “and then Hazel Marsh walks by down below, and Steve had _such _a crush on her.”  
  
“I did not,” Steve protests, but he’s smiling too. “Just wasn’t jazzed about her seeing me in my skivvies.”  
  
“You were definitely sweet on her,” Bucky argues.  
  
Sam laughs loudly, slapping his knee and wiping away tears. “That’s brutal! How long were you out there?”  
  
“God, at least a half hour.” Steve shakes his head, and shoves Bucky’s arm. “Asshole.”  
  
“I swear I just didn’t hear you.”  
  
“It was November. I almost froze to death. And _then _almost died of pneumonia.”  
  
“Yeah, that part wasn’t funny.” Bucky’s continued smirk doesn’t match the words coming out of his mouth, although Sam is sure he really does mean that. He knows how often Steve was sick before the serum, and can’t imagine how hard it was growing up knowing your best friend might die suddenly at any moment.  
  
“What did Hazel Marsh do?”  
  
“Laughed. Told all her friends,” Steve says, and then shrugs. “She’d never have liked me back anyway. Girls never did.”  
  
“Didn’t know what they were missing,” Bucky tells him. Then he blushes, and looks down at his lap, embarrassed to have said it in front of Sam, but Sam smiles to himself. His hurt at being left in the dark had been brief. Now, he’s a little bit over the moon for his friend. He can see the affection between them, now that he knows what he’s looking at.  
  
“Boys, I got something.”  
  
All three look up at Natasha in the doorway, with her hair messy and her eyes wide. Sam inhales, struck by the look on her face, and he’s up in a flash, following her back to the War Room with Steve and Bucky hot on his heels.  
  
She has what looks like order logs pulled up on the screen platform, and zooms in as soon as they’re all around the table to show them. “I’ve been tracking places in the area that might sell waste containers and I think I found them. This manufacturer is only a few hours away, and three weeks ago a company called Octo Incorporated ordered a hundred of them.”  
  
“Is that a real company?” Sam asks.  
  
She shakes her head. “It’s a shell corporation. Registered out of Tokyo, with financial statements filed in Moscow and Brazil and then the trail goes cold.”  
  
“You think it’s Hydra,” Steve concludes. His brow is furrowed into a deep frown, looking down at the orders before them.  
  
“If it is, the containers are being shipped two days from now. Without an address listed on the order.”  
  
“No paper trail.” Sam nods, and exhales heavily.  
  
“Or at least not one anyone else could track. Amazing work, Nat,” Steve tells her.  
  
“Do you think they’re coming here?” Bucky asks. He turns worried eyes to Natasha. “We can’t kill an innocent delivery man from a company that has no idea what they’re dealing with.”  
  
Natasha shakes her head again. “Honestly, I doubt it. Nothing else has been delivered directly to this place, supplies only come in on Hydra vehicles. They’re meeting their suppliers elsewhere and bringing stuff in themselves, they don’t want anybody knowing where this place is. My guess is, in two days, first thing in the morning we’ll watch a couple empty trucks drive outta here.”  
  
“So we follow them.”  
  
Natasha looks to Steve, and nods her confirmation. “Yeah.”  
  
* * *  
  
  
Bucky comes out of the bathroom with wet hair and a towel wrapped around his waist. Steve is reclined against the pillows, and had been nodding off before the sound of the door opening woke him up. He watches as Bucky putters around for a moment, running a comb through his long hair, leaving his Vibranium arm on the white dresser where he’d put it before heading for the shower. He’s left it there every night since they’ve been here. Steve isn’t sure if Bucky’s simply become accustomed to sleeping without it, or if he doesn’t trust himself to wear it in sleep in case a nightmare feels too real and he attacks Steve on half-conscious instinct.

When he tugs the towel from around his waist, revealing the strong muscles of his back and his bare ass, tanned skin and smooth lines, Steve whistles at him playfully, and Bucky turns to him, grinning.  
  
“Don’t objectify me,” he teases.  
  
“Why not?” Steve raises an eyebrow.  
  
Bucky snickers, and then turns more fully and lets Steve look. “Fine. Objectify away.”  
  
There are so many scars on his chest and shoulder, and Steve always wants to kiss them all. Silently apologize for letting Bucky fall, for being the catalyst for everything that happened to him after, even though Bucky wouldn’t let Steve say those things out loud. That he’s able to stand there, fully bare for Steve and let him see it all, is an improvement. He’d been ashamed of the scars, at first, and tried to hide them. He’s gorgeous anyway, scars and all. His stomach is toned and his thighs are powerful, soft cock hanging between them in a nest of chestnut curls, and Steve has loved every inch of him since the first time they were ever naked together, when they were 19. He was so perfect in Steve’s eyes, such a bright shining spark like a glimmer of gold punching through a stormy night. It meant everything that he’d wanted Steve back, and he’d lived in paranoia that one day Bucky would realize the magnitude of his mistake and find someone else, someone as golden as he was.  
  
Steve thinks maybe now, in this new world, he loves Bucky more than he did back then. He doesn’t see perfection anymore. He sees the hurts and the physical remnants of suffering and the pieces of him that are still healing, and loves it all so much more than the boy he unfairly put up too high on a pedestal. Fallible is better. Even if he’d have given his own left arm for the ability to protect Bucky from all of it in the first place.  
  
He offers his hand, and Bucky walks forward and takes it, climbing into Steve’s lap and settling on his thighs. Steve runs his hands up them, hard muscle and soft hair, until he reaches Bucky’s hips, cupping them in his palms. The way he gets Steve’s heart racing hasn’t changed. He still looks at Bucky and sees everything he’s ever wanted, everything he’s never quite believed he deserved and wanted to clutch so tightly to his chest for fear it would be snatched away from him. He felt that in Brooklyn before he ever knew how excruciating it would be when it happened. Now he clings even tighter.  
  
Bucky smiles down at him, eyes as beautiful as they always are when he smiles, and slides his fingers through Steve’s hair. “Everything set, for tomorrow?”  
  
“Think so.” Steve drags his left thumb in an arc over Bucky’s hipbone. The skin is smooth under his fingertip, calling to his mouth, but Steve holds back for now. “You still wanna stay here?”  
  
“Somebody has to.” Bucky’s gaze drops as he says it, settling around Steve’s collarbone. He’s ashamed of it, of being worried about what might happen if he goes with them. Steve hates it.  
  
Steve urges him closer, so he can press a kiss just below the metal shoulder socket, lips dragging over the scars.  
  
“D’you want me to come with you?”  
  
“Not if you don’t want to,” Steve says honestly. “You’re right. One of us needs to monitor the base.” He takes Bucky’s nipple into his mouth, sucking gently at it as Bucky sighs above him and his fingers squeeze a handful of Steve’s hair.  
  
“I thought I could do this,” he says sadly.  
  
Steve looks up at him. He reaches out, brushing Bucky’s cheek with the backs of his knuckles, gently bringing his face down so Steve can press a tender kiss to his lips. “You are doing it.”  
  
“I could’ve got Natasha killed, last time,” Bucky whispers.  
  
“That wasn’t –”  
  
“Don’t tell me it wasn’t my fault. It doesn’t matter if it’s my fault, it still happened.”  
  
Steve slides his other hand around to Bucky’s back, presses his palm to the small of it, keeping him close. “This one’s different. Me and Sam will be there, this time. She’s not doing it alone.”  
  
Bucky doesn’t answer, and Steve kisses him again. Slowly, Bucky responds, parting his lips to let Steve taste him, fingers curling around the back of Steve’s neck.  
  
“Can I touch you?” Steve murmurs.  
  
Bucky nods. “Yeah.”  
  
He moves his hand, fingers trailing feather-light over Bucky’s hip, leaving goosebumps in their wake. He scratches his fingernails gently through the hair between Bucky’s legs, wrist bumping his cock, before he wraps his fingers around it, feels it start to fill in his hand.  
  
“I’m proud of you,” he says softly, into Bucky’s lips as he strokes him. “Being here, even though it’s hard. Wanting to help.”  
  
“I gotta make things right. Make up for what I did.”  
  
“No, you don’t. You never hurt anyone. It was them.” Steve swipes the head of Bucky’s cock with his thumb, spreading the moisture pearling there, wanting to taste it but also not wanting to let go.  
  
Bucky’s eyes slip closed, pleasure warring in his head with the urge to berate himself. Steve wants to chase those urges away, kiss Bucky until he forgets everything bad that’s ever happened, until he’s nothing but sparkly smiles. But he can’t. He runs the tip of his nose along Bucky’s jaw, through the rough stubble, and then presses a kiss to a softer spot under his chin. Every time he looks at Bucky, he sees the boy from Brooklyn who loved him. That boy was so confident, and charming, and with Steve he was so sweet and loving and genuine. But he also sees the man Bucky is now. Steve isn’t the person he was back then either, and he isn’t stuck on a version of Bucky that existed before Hydra happened to him. He loves Bucky to the ends of the earth for exactly who he is right now.  
  
“Doesn’t make me feel less responsible for it.” Bucky’s fingers squeeze around the back of Steve’s neck and he seems to get heavier in Steve’s lap, like he’s deflating. “I thought it would get better. I thought I’d learn how to live with it, but every time I remember something new it’s like a nightmare I can’t wake up from. I can see myself doing these things, all this blood and pain, but I can’t stop it.”  
  
“I know,” Steve whispers to him. He moves his other hand up, presses it between Bucky’s shoulder blades instead, gently pulls him down so he’s resting more fully against Steve’s chest, head tucked into Steve’s shoulder. Steve could tell him again – for the dozenth, hundredth, millionth time – that it isn’t his fault. And it would be the truth, but he understands it doesn’t take the pain away. So he just kisses Bucky’s forehead and repeats, “I know, sweetheart.”  
  
“You’ve saved the world so many times.” Bucky’s voice breaks as Steve twists his fist around the head of his cock, leaking now over his fingers. It fits so perfectly in Steve’s hand. Soft, warm skin, firmness to squeeze his palm around. Steve remembers so vividly the first time he touched it. The first time they put their hands on each other, the first time he came with Bucky’s hand down his pants and Bucky’s lips on his neck. It was such a long time ago, but it’s always fresh in his mind.  
  
“I’ve made mistakes, too, Buck. Mistakes that resulted in people dying. So have the others. I know it’s not the same. But you’re not alone. And this time we’ll save the world together.”  
  
Bucky’s shoulders shake as he exhales.  
  
“D’you want to stop?” Steve asks, hand stilling against Bucky’s erection, still thick and warm in his hand even with the darkened mood in the room.  
  
Bucky shakes his head. “Wanna feel good for a while. M’sorry, I know that’s selfish.”  
  
“It’s not selfish.” Steve squeezes him, rubs his thumb over sensitive spots he knows better than he knows his own body. He learned them decades ago and never, ever forgot. He nudges Bucky’s cheek with his nose, finally letting go of his cock so he can curl both hands around Bucky’s hips. “Lie back, let me take care of you.”  
  
Bucky goes willingly, pliantly, letting himself be moved, letting Steve lay him down onto the mattress and cover his body with his own. Steve kisses him soundly, deep and slow, pouring emotions into it that he doesn’t have words for because he’s never been good at stringing a sentence together where Bucky is concerned. He just feels it all too deeply to put it into words. Bucky’s hand stays in Steve’s hair, as he moves lower and takes Bucky into his mouth, fingers gripping handfuls of it to act as an anchor for emotions he, too, can’t let bubble up past the surface or they’d all spill out and he’d never be able to get them back in. Steve knows that struggle so well, and tries to communicate love and understanding into the slide of his lips over Bucky’s heated flesh.  
  
“Steve,” Bucky whispers, sighing out his name, his voice shaky and broken, and Steve’s stomach swoops.  
  
He slowly laves his tongue up the underside as he draws back, and then swirls it in a languid circle around the head. He takes Bucky’s balls into his hand, squeezing gently as he picks up the pace and sucks harder around his cock. The familiar pulse of salt is heavenly on his tongue, and Bucky’s hand pulls at his hair, warning, but Steve doesn’t pull away, lets Bucky come down his throat.  
  
Bucky’s chest heaves as Steve sucks him through it and then gently licks him clean, until Bucky nudges him back with a quiet whine. Steve blinks dark spots from his vision and looks up at him, Bucky still flat on his back with his hair messy on the pillow and a glowing sheen of sweat dappled over his skin. He’s so beautiful it’s tragic. So covered in the physical marks of all the things that were taken from him, but they could never steal his beauty. Not if they’d had him for two centuries, or ten.  
  
Steve crawls up his body, pressing soft kisses to his stomach and chest as he moves, briefly sucking on a nipple again before he gets up high enough to capture Bucky’s lips. Bucky’s hand strokes through Steve’s hair as they kiss, fingers scratching along his scalp, and the feeling slides as shivers down Steve’s spine.  
  
“Can I …?” Bucky asks.  
  
Steve bumps their noses together, once, twice, nuzzling him. “Don’t have to.”  
  
“Want to. Feed it to me?”  
  
“Fuck,” Steve breathes, as his stomach turns in another rush of butterflies and arousal. He walks up on his knees, climbing carefully over Bucky until he’s seated on his chest, knees on either side of his head, and can gingerly take his own straining erection out of his sweatpants and softly smear the moisture at the tip along Bucky’s red lips. Bucky’s tongue darts out to taste, eyes falling closed on a low moan as if it’s the most decadent flavor, and Steve has to steady himself with his other hand gripping the headboard.  
  
“Sometimes when I close my eyes, I see you in Brooklyn,” Steve says, later, when the thrumming in his veins has mellowed into a warm afterglow and Bucky is settled against his chest, his head tucked into the hollow where Steve’s neck meets his shoulder. “Stained t-shirt, one suspender slipped off your shoulder. Hair all messed up. Smoking on the fire escape, looking out at the city with me.”  
  
“I shouldn’t have smoked around you, with your lungs the way they were.”  
  
“We didn’t know how bad it was back then.”  
  
“You always used to draw me when you thought I wasn’t looking.”  
  
Steve smiles. “Sometimes I knew you were.”  
  
“Doesn’t sound like the greatest memory.”  
  
“No, it’s perfect.” Steve kisses his forehead. “You were so beautiful. I was so madly in love with you.”  
  
“Me too,” Bucky says softly.  
  
“Maybe there’s an alternate universe somewhere, where those two kids are still who we are. Maybe we left Brooklyn, moved some place where we could be together. Maybe we had a cat and regular jobs and got old.”  
  
“You still would’ve hated being small.”  
  
“I probably would’ve gotten over it. If I knew you loved me anyway.”  
  
“I did,” Bucky confirms. “I do.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
* * *


	7. Casualty

In the morning, as Natasha predicted, three men get into three trucks, without loading anything into the cargo holds, and drive off down the single dirt road that heads away from the mountains.  
  
She pulls at a strap on her gear, tightening it, as Sam climbs into the cockpit of a smaller jet. There are three of them, on the airship’s lowest level near a hanger door. They’ll take two; Sam and Natasha in one and Steve in the other. They have no idea where the trucks are heading or how far away the meet-up will take place, so they’ve planned for as many disasters as they could think of in brainstorming sessions over the last two days. Inevitability, the one thing they haven’t thought of is the thing that will go wrong, but Steve is generally confident in their collective ability to think on their feet. It’s worked for them so far.  
  
“See you soon,” Natasha says to Bucky, grinning at him with the type of excitement someone might exhibit if they were off to a state fair instead of a potentially dangerous operation.  
  
“You better,” Bucky warns, serious about it even though Natasha just winks at him and hops into the jet behind Sam.  
  
Sam salutes at them and takes off, hovering off the ground just for a moment before he guides the jet through the open door, into the air and out of sight.  
  
Steve has one foot in his own jet when Bucky grabs his arm and pulls him roughly into a kiss.  
  
“Be safe,” he whispers, holding Steve tightly for just a moment before he lets go.  
  
“I will,” Steve promises.  
  
They’re in the air for an hour, following at a safe distance behind the trucks and high up enough that they won’t be detected. Bucky gives them periodic updates in their earpieces on the lack of action back at the base, and that should be reassuring but it makes Steve nervous. He can’t shake the nagging feeling that something is going to go down while they’re all far away, and Bucky will be left to deal with it on his own.  
  
“I see something,” Natasha’s voice says in Steve’s ear, as they follow the trucks around a long bend in the road that leads to a lake. There are no buildings or houses or any other signs of life for miles, but there’s an orange and white semi-truck idling next to a thick thatch of trees.  
  
“That’s gotta be it,” Sam agrees. “Unless they’re getting a furniture delivery in the middle of absolutely fuckin’ nowhere.”  
  
“You’re sure we can’t just take them all out right here?” Natasha asks. “We’ve got the fire-power.”  
  
“We’re not murdering a delivery guy, Nat,” Steve says sternly, noticing a sharp inhale that he recognizes as Bucky. He carefully dips his jet just a little lower, to get a better view of the truck through the trees. The three they’ve been following pull up to the semi and slow to a halt.  
  
“A delivery guy from a company that is selling illegal weapons materials to _Hydra_,” she points out.  
  
“Steel barrels are not illegal. We have no idea where the uranium came from. And we’ve gotta make this look like an accident, remember? If they figure out somebody’s sabotaging them our whole operation is blown.”  
  
“Yeah, yeah,” she grumbles. “Fine, just checking.”  
  
Across the lake, they land both jets as silently as they can. It’s a short jog around the edge of the water, staying hidden in the cover of trees, to a clump of large boulders that they can crouch behind to watch as the semi driver rolls up the door of his truck to reveal stacks of yellow containers. One Hydra agent speaks to him briefly, as the other two begin unloading and moving the barrels to their own trucks.  
  
“That’ll take them a least a few minutes,” Sam says quietly, to Steve’s right. “You got this, Nat?”  
  
“Duh,” she answers.  
  
Once the third agent and the semi driver begin to assist with the transfer, Natasha slips out of their hiding spot. Sticking expertly to the shadows, she creeps over toward the men. Sam pulls a gun from a holster around his waist and holds it at the ready, resting his forearms on the rock in front of them, watching intently and ready to fire if she’s spotted.  
  
“Easy,” Steve warns him. It’s only if absolutely necessary. Shooting them would definitely blow their cover.  
  
“I know, Cap,” Sam mutters tersely.  
  
Steve closes his eyes for a moment and feels badly. “I know you do. Sorry.”  
  
Like it’s no trouble at all, Natasha slinks in close enough and sneaks around the back of the lead truck, slipping underneath it to plant a small explosive on the brake-line. In only a minute she resurfaces, the agents none-the-wiser, and makes her way stealthily back towards them. Steve doesn’t notice the tension in his shoulders until she’s back safe, ducking down behind them, and he feels himself relax.  
  
“How fucked are we if this doesn’t work?” Sam asks.  
  
“It’ll work.” Natasha nudges Steve’s side. “C’mon, let’s go.”  
  
Before Steve can even react, the deafening crack of a bullet being fired rings through the air, ricocheting off the trees and echoing like a thunderclap. Steve’s heart leaps into his throat, and he looks up just in time to see the semi-truck driver fall to the ground, body rumpled and lifeless before he even hits the dirt.  
  
“What was that?” Bucky’s voice cries in their ears, panicked.  
  
“Shit,” Natasha hisses.  
  
“The delivery guy,” Steve tells Bucky, clenching his fists in anger and barely resisting the urge to punch the rock-face in front of him. “Fuck. _Fuck_.”  
  
“We gotta go,” Natasha repeats, more urgently now, and Steve feels sick to his stomach but he follows her, with Sam trailing after him, back around the lake to their jets.  
  
They climb back in and take off, hovering in the air while they wait for the agents to finish moving the containers. Nobody speaks, and hot pulses of misery course through Steve as he sits in the thick silence. As always, nobody innocent is supposed to be hurt, and as is too often the case, someone was. Eventually the trucks are closed up and restarted and they roll away, falling back into line with the lead in front. Steve takes off after them first, following from a safe distance like before, until they reach a blind curve on a downward slope Steve had spotted on the way to the meet-up, and the lead truck goes around it.  
  
“Now,” Steve commands, and Natasha listens. He hears the click of a detonator, and below them a small puff of smoke. It happens quickly. The lead truck accelerates down the hill, losing control and crashing into the rock at the bottom. Unable to stop in time, the second truck plows into the back of the first, crushing the containers inside it like they’d been hoping. The third truck doesn’t; that driver managing to slam on still in-tact brakes and screech to a halt, but only barely.  
  
Sam swears under his breath. They’d been hoping, although not overly confident, that all three would crash.  
  
“What happened?” Bucky’s voice asks.  
  
“Only the first two crashed,” Sam tells him.  
  
“Good enough,” Natasha says. “It’ll still slow them down.”  
  
“Maybe there’s a way we can …” Steve begins, but trails off as no ideas immediately come to mind.  
  
“Can what?” Natasha asks. “If we start loading bullets into them it won’t look like an accident anymore.”  
  
“Guys, there’s a gas leak,” Sam’s voice says.  
  
Steve looks down, and sure enough he sees liquid dripping out from the first truck’s engine. The agents from the last truck have emerged, hurrying over toward the first two. Their drivers haven’t shown themselves, either injured or dead or trapped in the wreckage. Flashes of the semi-truck driver falling to the ground play behind Steve’s eyelids, and he seethes.  
  
“One bullet,” he says. “One bullet fired right at that gas-line and the whole thing blows to smithereens.”  
  
“Steve,” Bucky’s voice says. “No.”  
  
“You guys go,” Steve continues, not listening to the protests coming through his earpiece. “I got this.”  
  
“Steve!” Bucky yells, but Natasha cuts in, “no, he’s right. If we take out all three trucks and all six agents, it’ll slow everything down a lot more. It’ll take the base days to figure out what happened. And it’ll still look like an accident if it’s an explosion. Cars explode all the time after a bad crash.”  
  
Sam might be arguing; Steve doesn’t hear them anymore. He’s taking his jet down to the road a few dozen yards behind the trucks and climbing out, hurrying along towards the crash. Leaning against the rock wall and peeking out beyond a boulder, he aims at the engine of the first truck and fires. The explosion is bigger than he’s expecting. It knocks him backwards, the force of it throwing his body back and bouncing helplessly down to the road.  
  
There’s yelling in his ear, and ringing in the other, and pain blooming hot and intense all over his body. The ringing is too loud to hear, and he winces against the throbbing in his head and his left leg, and tries to stand. He stumbles, falling back to the ground and gasping as his leg screams at him. He’s used to pain but it still tears through him, nerve-endings alight and on fire.  
  
Finally the fog from the noise clears enough to recognize the shouting in his ear as Bucky, panicked and frantic and demanding to know what’s going on. The others are calling his name, holding their position until he responds.  
  
Steve looks up at them and waves his hand. “Go, I’m fine,” he grinds out from between clenched teeth, trying again to stand so he can drag himself back to his jet but stumbling.  
  
“I swear to God, Cap,” Sam’s voice says angrily.  
  
Behind him, their jet lands, and Sam jumps out and rushes towards him, grabbing Steve under the armpits and hoisting him up.  
  
“_Go, I’m fine_,” Sam mocks as he helps Steve limp back up the road, leaning a considerable amount of his weight onto Sam’s shoulders. “Like we’d just fucking leave you here.”  
  
“Is he alright?” Bucky says. “Somebody fucking tell me –”  
  
“He blew himself up, is what he did,” Sam says, holding tight around Steve’s waist. “But he’ll be fine, stop freaking out.”  
  
Bucky makes a frustrated noise but doesn’t say anything else.  
  
“We’re on our way back,” Natasha tells him.  
  
Sam helps Steve into their jet, loading him into the passenger’s seat behind Natasha who’s moved up behind the wheel. He leaves them, goes back to pilot Steve’s jet, and Natasha takes off into the air and speeds through it, much faster than on the way here now that they aren’t following vehicles on the ground.  
  
Steve groans in pain as he tries to move his leg, and looks down for the first time to see a gash through his pants and skin, bleeding profusely.  
  
“Keep pressure on it,” Natasha says. “Just a few minutes, these things can really move.”  
  
It hurts like hell to press his forearm down over the gash but he does it anyway, gritting his teeth and holding it firmly for less than five minutes, although the seconds seem to tick by a whole lot slower. Bucky is waiting for them near the hanger door as they land on the airship. He’s pale, and his eyes are wide and worried. He helps Steve out and, with Sam on his other side, they manage to half-carry him to the medical suite on the third floor.  
  
Sam makes quick work of it once they plop him down on the table. He rips Steve’s pants to get the fabric away from the wound, splashing hydrogen peroxide over it that stings like crazy and then threading a needle and driving it through Steve’s skin. Steve swears and tries to hold still.  
  
“Here, squeeze my hand if you want, you big baby,” Natasha says to him, joking but taking his hand anyway. Her cheeks are also paler than usual.  
  
In spite of the pain, Steve laughs. “Fuck you.”  
  
“Yeah, I love you too, Rogers.”  
  
In another minute he’s stitched up, and Sam cuts and folds squares of gauze to press over the fresh stitches and wraps surgical tape around Steve’s leg to keep it in place. Then he wipes at the blood on Steve’s cheek with the astringent, warning again that it will sting and wincing sympathetically when Steve inhales sharply as it does, and then fanning it to dry the skin and securing a butterfly bandage over it.  
  
“That’ll leave a nice scar,” he says, pointing to Steve’s face. His hand shakes a little, now that he doesn’t need it to patch Steve up anymore, like the flow of adrenaline has abruptly ceased and now he’s crashing.  
  
“I don’t scar,” Steve tells him, moving the muscles in his cheek, trying to adjust to the constricting feel of the bandage.  
  
“Oh. Right.”  
  
“He doesn’t stay injured for long, either,” Natasha reminds everyone. “So you can all stop looking like you’re attending his funeral. That didn’t go _quite_ according to plan, but it worked. Even if we left some super-soldier blood behind.”  
  
Steve’s whole body hurts so he partly feels like defending his own right to wallow in it for at least an hour or two, but she’s also right. In 12 hours these injuries will be gone, leaving no trace behind them that they ever existed in the first place. All things considered, it isn’t a terrible problem to have.  
  
Bucky is still brooding in the shadowy corner of the room, ignoring Natasha’s request to lighten up. “Can you guys leave us for a minute?”  
  
“We’ve still gotta debrief,” Sam says.  
  
“Later,” Bucky says, curtly, and then a little nicer, he adds, “please.”  
  
Sam and Natasha share a long, exhausted look. Then Sam sighs, puts his hands up as if to say _okay, fine_, and heads out. Natasha follows, patting Bucky on the shoulder as she goes. She speaks just to him, but Steve hears her anyway: “Be nice, he’s wounded.”  
  
Bucky doesn’t react to her. He stays focused on Steve as the door closes behind their friends, his hands both clenched into fists and a vein working in his left temple. He looks furious, but Steve knows him too well to think that’s all it is.  
  
“I’m okay,” Steve tells him. He knows it won’t help.  
  
Bucky shakes his head, his mouth opening and closing twice on words he doesn’t say.  
  
“Buck.”  
  
“Don’t fucking do that.”  
  
“Do what?”  
  
“Say my _name_ like that! In that voice!”  
  
“I’m not saying it in any voice!” Steve protests. “I’m just … saying it.”  
  
“Well! Don’t,” Bucky returns, clearly coming up short in the search for a snappier retort.  
  
“I’m sorry I scared you.”  
  
“You should be.” Bucky moves towards him and isn’t gentle about thumping Steve on the shoulder. “You have to _stop_ this, you have to stop fucking sacrificing yourself every time the chance presents itself. Asshole,” he adds, whacking Steve again, harder this time.  
  
“Ow,” Steve comments.  
  
Bucky glares. “This isn’t a joke.”  
  
“I can tell, since you’re hitting me.”  
  
“Somebody has to knock some sense into you. Although I don’t know why I even bother, I’ve known you close to a century and you never had any fucking sense back then either. Picking fights with guys twice your size just to make some bully give a little girl her dolly back, winding up with two black eyes and six broken ribs.”  
  
“At least I got the doll back.” Steve tries again to inject some levity back into this heavy conversation. It doesn’t work, and the dark expression on Bucky’s face hits Steve in the center of his chest because it definitely isn’t just anger. Bucky is mad, but he’s a lot of other things, too.  
  
“Yeah, you did,” he agrees, quietly. “You got to be the hero, like always. Problem is, you never gave a shit that _I _was the one who had to take care of your busted-up ass every time you wanted to pretend you were invincible just because you had righteousness on your side. You remember that, right? You remember that your old man was dead, and your Ma worked two jobs, so it was _me _sitting by your hospital bed for three days that time you had a concussion. Or did you really not notice how many times I had to finish a fight that you started? How many messes you made that I had to clean up?”  
  
That isn’t entirely fair, and he’s in pain, and his ears are still ringing from the explosion and now Bucky is yelling at him, and Steve bristles. “Maybe shit like this is why you shouldn’t have come with us. We have so much damn history, every little thing turns into a giant dramatic issue!”  
  
“Because I _care _about you?” Bucky returns angrily. “That’s why you don’t want me here?”  
  
“Nat and Sam care about me! This line of work is dangerous, Buck! All three of us get hurt all the time and manage to handle it without yelling at each other while we’re still bleeding!”  
  
Bucky’s expression darkens even further, his eyes intense and sad and angry, and Steve instantly regrets lashing out.  
  
“I’m okay,” Steve reminds him, again. He’s surprised his mouth can form words. He’s never seen Bucky like this, and it terrifies him.  
  
“This time!”  
  
“What do you want me to do?”  
  
“I want you to be more fucking careful! I want …” he trails off, sighing in frustration and closing his eyes.  
  
Steve really touched a nerve this time. He feels terrible about it, and doesn’t know how to make it better. He holds out his hand. “Bucky.”  
  
Bucky takes it and lets himself be pulled in, fitting into the V of Steve’s thighs, his knees bracketing Bucky’s hips. He leans forward when Steve prompts him, forehead resting on Steve’s and sharing the air that passes between them.  
  
“You’re right, and I’m sorry,” he murmurs. “I was never the real hero. It was always you.”  
  
“That’s not even close to the point. I’m not looking for credit.”  
  
“Tell me what you need,” Steve implores, willing in that moment to give Bucky whatever it might be, just to put a smile back on his face.  
  
Bucky’s hands come up to curl around the back of Steve’s neck. “You gotta stop being willing to die every time there’s danger. You were like this during the war, too. You think I don’t remember that? You tossing yourself on top of every grenade, throwing your body in front of every bullet even if they weren’t going to hit anybody.”  
  
“I don’t _want_ to die. But that’s the job.”  
  
“No, it isn’t. Sacrificing yourself as Plan A isn’t the job. You’re not a damn kamikaze. It shouldn’t even be a last resort, it shouldn’t be on the table at all.”  
  
Licking his lips, Steve places a soft kiss to the corner of Bucky’s mouth. “M’sorry I scared you,” he says again.  
  
“You did,” Bucky says softly. “I don’t like seeing you hurt. And I don’t like seeing you constantly ready to throw your life away like it’s nothing. Because it isn’t nothing. Not to me. And not to them.”  
  
“Who?”  
  
“Natasha. And Feathers. And all the rest of your friends, even the ones you’re not on good terms with right now. If you care about them even a fraction as much as they all care about you, you wouldn’t keep diving head first into the fire like you think it wouldn’t matter if you left us.”  
  
“I don’t wanna leave you,” Steve promises. “Ever.”  
  
“Good,” Bucky answers, his voice thick. “Don’t. I’m fucking sick of losing you.”   
  
“If I can help it, I won’t.”  
  
“You know what your biggest flaw was, when we were kids?”  
  
Steve exhales through his nose. “No, but you’re gonna tell me anyway, aren’t you?”  
  
Bucky doesn’t, right away. He frowns at Steve, sadness shining in his blue eyes, and kisses him. It’s soft and tender and heartfelt, and Steve leans into it, taking the comfort Bucky is offering. When their lips fall apart but stay almost touching, Bucky whispers, “I love you.”  
  
“Me too.” Steve’s hand slides into Bucky’s hair, gripping the sweaty strands between his fingers. Bucky was really scared, and Steve feels awful about it.  
  
“It wasn’t physical,” Bucky says to him, eyes closed and his lips brushing against Steve’s cheek as he speaks. “It wasn’t that you were small, or malnourished, or the heart murmur, or the shit immune system. It was that you believed, _way_ more than anyone else did, that what was outside mattered more than what was inside. You never really believed you were worth anything. And I tried so fuckin’ hard to get you to see yourself the way I saw you, but it never took.”  
  
Steve’s stomach churns, and he feels himself tense and relax and tense again in a wave, heat rising in his cheeks. It isn’t new information. Bucky isn’t wrong. It just isn’t easy to hear. Shame and guilt and inadequacy, hot and twisting, rise in his throat, mixed with the pain in his leg. He’s become skilled over the years at shoving those feelings right back down, but it’s impossible once they’re laid out in front of him. He says Bucky’s name again, not knowing what else to say. Bucky is so close, his warmth radiating out through Steve, his lips on Steve’s cheek; loving him and accepting him even with all the things Steve hates about himself that unexpectedly rear their ugly heads. Somehow, that makes things better and worse at the same time.  
  
“I thought all this might change that.” Bucky rubs his hands over Steve’s biceps, indicating he means the serum that made him bigger. “It didn’t, though. You still don’t think you’re worth a damn, and that kills me, Steve. If you could see what I see when I look at you …”  
  
“What do I do?” Steve asks, voice coming up weak and raspy.  
  
“I don’t know,” Bucky admits. “I’m sorry, I wish I did.”  
  
Steve shakes his head, and Bucky envelopes him in a hug, warm and understanding in a way that cuts in Steve’s chest.  
  
* * *  
  
  
She’s in the War Room, early in the morning, scanning absently through live video of different areas of the compound. A soft knock at the door rouses her from the semi-trance she’d sunk into watching a red and orange figure pace on the heat sensor screen, in what they’ve determined is some kind of head office. She looks up, and Sam walks into the room, with a mug in each hand. He sets one down on the platform in front of her, and she takes it with a smile, curling her fingers around it and absorbing the warmth.  
  
“Sleep okay?”  
  
Sam nods. “I can take over.”  
  
It was her night-shift, and she is tired, but she shrugs and doesn’t make any move to leave. Sam pulls up a chair and sits next to her.  
  
“Anything new?”  
  
“Not really. It’s been pretty quiet.”  
  
“Nothing about the trucks not coming back?”  
  
“Not that I could pick up on. Although I’m sure they’ve noticed. Our audio doesn’t cover the entire compound.” She takes a long sip, delicious sweet and bitter coffee slipping down her throat and warming her from the inside. She hadn’t realized she’d been shivering until feeling the warmth in comparison. She’d lost track of time, sitting here staring at the screens. It might have been quite a while since she’s moved. “Barnes and Rogers still sleeping?”  
  
Sam shrugs. “Not sure. Haven’t seen them.”  
  
Natasha looks at him. Tries to gauge the expression on his face, although it isn’t easily readable. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. About them. It wasn’t fair that you were the only one in the dark.”  
  
He sighs, and glances up at her for a moment before returning his gaze to the coffee in front of him. “How long have you known?”  
  
“Officially, only a few months. Steve admitted it when I confronted him about it, when he was in Wakanda that first time, after Barnes woke up.”  
  
“But you knew for a lot longer than that, unofficially.”  
  
“I suspected, yes.”  
  
“I don’t know why I didn’t see it.”  
  
“You did see it. Everybody sees it,” she counters, as kindly as she can, knowing she’s right when Sam sighs again.  
  
“I told myself I must be imagining things, because he let me chase an assassin who’d been brainwashed by Nazis around the world for almost two years and never mentioned the guy used to be his boyfriend. But looking back, yeah. I did see it.”  
  
“If it had been my secret to tell, I would’ve told you sooner.”  
  
“I know, Nat.” He offers her a small smile, and she returns it. “I’m really not mad at him. I’m mad at myself, you know? For whatever I did that made him think he couldn’t tell me.”  
  
“I’m sure it wasn’t about you. They’re from an era when it was something a guy could end up in jail for. And then after everything that happened with SHIELD, and Tony and the Accords … I bet more than anything, Steve is just used to having to hide it. And really protective of it.”  
  
Sam is about to respond, when movement on the platform screen in front of them catches Natasha’s eye and she holds one finger up to stop him. A second red figure joins the first, the pacing one she’d been half-watching. Quickly, Natasha waves her hand over the screen to enable their limited audio.  
  
“What are they saying?” Sam asks.  
  
Natasha shushes him, narrowing her eyes and listening intently to the hushed male voices coming through the speaker. They’re conversing in tense, rapid German, and she’s nothing close to fluent but knows enough to pick up at least some of what they’re saying. She’ll get Bucky to listen to the recording later and confirm it. When the two men stop talking, and loud footsteps are followed by the sound of a door slamming, Natasha regretfully says, “I think they know.”  
  
Sam frowns at her. “Know what?”  
  
“Well they know about the crash, for sure. Someone went looking for the trucks when they never came back.”  
  
“We figured they would.”  
  
Natasha presses her lips together, and wracks her brain. “_Schaute _…” she repeats, turning the word over in her mind. “I’m pretty sure that means they think they’re being watched.”  
  
“So they know about _us_?”  
  
“Not specifically about us. Just that someone is onto them.”  
  
“That’s …” Sam blows out a heavy breath. His elbows rest on the table and he slumps over a little. “Damnit. That’s what we were trying to avoid.”  
  
“It’s not ideal,” Natasha agrees.  
  
“They didn’t buy that the driver just lost control?”  
  
“They were talking too fast, my German’s rusty.” Natasha shakes her head, and rewinds the recording a minute, listening again. “_Jede möglichkeit_ … something about possibilities. They’re considering all options, I think is what that means. They think it could have been an accident, but are worried it wasn’t.”  
  
“If they go through the wreckage and find the bullet …”  
  
“Yeah.” She pauses the recording again, and looks at Sam. His dark eyes are worried, eyebrows furrowed.  
  
“What do we do?”  
  
“First we get Barnes in here to make sure I’m not translating wrong.”  
  
“Translating what wrong?”  
  
Natasha and Sam both look up. Bucky’s in the doorway, in plaid flannel pyjama pants with his hair pulled back into a bun near the crown of his skull, holding a white mug in his Vibranium hand. Steve is just behind him, peering at them over Bucky’s shoulder with sleep-tousled strands of dark blond hair falling into his eyes. Natasha waves them over. “Come listen to this.”  
  
They enter the room, Bucky leaning over onto his forearms on the platform and listening as Natasha replays it for him. “They’re talking about the trucks … they think maybe it wasn’t an accident. Maybe someone knows what they’re up to.”  
  
“That’s what I thought,” Natasha says, grimly.  
  
Steve doesn’t need to say a single word for Natasha to read in his face that he’s instantly blaming himself. They don’t really have time to deal with that right now, so she doesn’t.  
  
“We have to storm the base, don’t we?” Sam’s asking, voice flat and expression resigned.  
  
Natasha shakes her head and walks a few steps away, not saying _no_, just not knowing what the hell to say because she doesn’t know what the hell to do. “They’re not gonna just go through with their plans, if they think somebody’s onto them.”  
  
“Are we talking about killing them?” Bucky asks, sounding distressed. “There’s over three dozen men down there.”  
  
“It’s Hydra,” Sam points out.  
  
“Don’t tell him how to feel about that,” Steve interjects, and Sam makes a frustrated noise.  
  
“Jesus, Steve, I’m not. I’m saying they’re down there building a bomb, it’s not like they’re innocent civilians.”  
  
“How did they sound?” Natasha asks, turning back around and addressing Bucky. “Those two. Were they discussing it as a casual possibility? Or were they really worried?”  
  
Bucky presses his lips together and glances briefly at Steve before answering. “They didn’t sound casual. I’d say more like … panicked.”  
  
Sam raises his eyebrows and holds his hands out as if to say, _see?_   
  
Steve is frowning, and looking at Natasha. Wheels turning in his head, planning his words carefully before he speaks. “If they get spooked, and start trying to relocate …”  
  
“It could be months before we find them again,” Natasha answers, as sorry about it as the rest of them. She’d hoped this could be avoided. “Their network is massive, global. I have no idea what their resource base is like.”  
  
“Could they move all that uranium?”  
  
“I mean, they got it all here.” She shrugs. “So yeah, they can probably get it out.”  
  
Bucky’s eyes find hers, sadness lingering among all that clear blue, and she tries to smile reassuringly but she imagines it just comes off pained and apologetic. “Is this really our only option?” he asks.  
  
“I’m sorry,” she says, genuinely. She knows he’s seen enough blood to last multiple lifetimes. “I wish I could think of another way. If they go back underground, we might not find them again in time to stop them.”  
  
Bucky’s gaze lingers, just for a moment, and then his face changes, shifting fluidly from upset to resigned and determined. “Alright. What’s the plan?”  
  
* * *  
  
  
For the first time in over two years, he dresses in tactical gear. Shuri had fashioned all four of them new suits with Vibranium technology woven into the fibres. Steve, because he’s Steve, thanked her for them but has worn his own uniform the few times he’s left the airship. It’s navy blue, and torn in a few places, and Bucky thinks there used to be a silver star in the center of the chest that isn’t there anymore. Bucky hasn’t asked him why, and he hasn’t worn his own uniform, yet. It’s been waiting in a closet with the rest of their gear, for him to stop being such a coward and join his team on the battlefield. He still doesn’t want to. He loathes himself for the thought, but can’t turn it off. As best he can, he pushes it down. He’ll deal with that later. Or never. Never sounds a lot better.  
  
Flexible bullet-proof plates attach to the suit over his shoulders, chest, and thighs – protecting his organs and major arteries. Weapons tuck into pouches and fit into holsters. Three guns, two knives, and two small round objects that Bucky derives are similar to the pin grenades they used during the war, only technologically advanced by about a thousand years. Next to him in the small room, the others are dressing as well. Tightening straps, pulling zippers, locking weapons into place. The mood reflects fairly accurately what Bucky’s feeling brewing inside his own chest; tense, regretful that it’s come to this, but resigned to it.   
  
The only difference is they’re all used to this. They’re used to running recklessly into a firefight, to facing their own mortality every other day, to taking lives. Bucky should be used to it. He’s stopped more hearts than any of them. But he isn’t. And he isn’t so sure anymore that he’s prepared to handle doing it again. He thought he was. He promised Steve he was. He might have been wrong, and it’s too late to back out.  
  
“Communicate,” Steve is saying, addressing the group collectively, like a coach giving a pep-talk to his team before an important game. Bucky hadn’t, but suddenly does, remember Captain Rogers from the war, leading their unit, brave and kind and selfless but still very much in charge. “You see something weird, you tell the rest of us. If you’re in trouble, ask for backup. We’re outnumbered at least seven to one, we gotta have each other’s backs.”  
  
“Aye-aye, Captain,” Natasha jokes, with a salute, but it’s to lighten the mood, not meant to disrespect. They might bicker and jockey for control but Steve is inarguably their leader.  
  
“You good, Buck?” Steve asks him, with a manly clap on the shoulder. It isn’t how he’d touch Bucky in different circumstances. Bucky finds he doesn’t like it.  
  
He forces a smile. “Yeah. Let’s do this.”  
  
The base is whisper quiet, as they make their way down. Sam reversed the mechanism that makes the aircraft invisible, revealing it so they’ll be able to find it again when they return. Then he lowered it several feet from the height it’s been hovering for a month, so that Steve can just free-fall and land acrobatically onto the roof of the building and Sam only has to carry Bucky and Natasha down. His boots land silently in the sand, and Sam flies back up for Natasha. He lets her go about ten feet off the ground, and she lands lightly beside Bucky, crouching for a moment to absorb the impact and then standing and nodding her head to one side, indicating he follow her.  
  
They jog over to the same window she’d entered the compound through the first time, and climb in. Bucky doesn’t feel amazing about attacking the base while everyone is sleeping, but he understands it gives them the only advantage they might get. He tries to continually remind himself these are people who want to murder thousands, maybe millions. It’s just that Hydra told the Soldier his targets were bad people too, and maybe they were, but he was never allowed to question it. It’s difficult to arrange whatever’s left of his moral compass in a direction that points to anyone deserving to die in their bed.  
  
They approach the first wing of sleeping quarters and slip into the nearest room. It reminds Bucky of barracks during the war; rows of single beds on metal frames, the figures occupying them motionless in the dark. Natasha’s gun is quiet, nothing but a muffled thump as she fires the first bullet. Bucky watches it enter a man’s skull, watches his chest still as his breathing ceases and blood trickle down the side of his face. He has tanned skin, and a moustache, and thin eyebrows. For just a moment, it paralyzes him.  
  
_“Mission report.”_  
  
He shakes himself, shakes the memory away.  
  
“We have to,” Natasha whispers to him, seeing him struggling. Her fingers squeeze around his elbow, just for a second, before she’s onto the next bed.  
  
Bucky doesn’t deserve her kindness, her compassion. He walks slowly over to the first bed in the left row, aims the barrel of his gun at the temple of a skull, clenches his teeth, and pulls the trigger.  
  
_“Dein Käpt’n kann dich dieses Mal nicht retten.”_  
  
_No_. Another sharp shake of his head, another memory tossed violently away. Bucky moves. Muscle memory returns, the skill of moving stealthily, unseen and unheard, pulling triggers and ending lives. It gets easier with each bullet fired, until he meets Natasha at the far wall, in a room full of souls released back to the universe. Maybe there is absolution for them, somewhere in the beyond. A lifetime ago, Bucky used to believe in such things.  
  
As they swiftly exit the room and Natasha closes the door behind her, into her earpiece she says, “first room completed.”  
  
“The guards are down,” Sam’s voice answers in their ears.  
  
“Security cameras?” Natasha asks.  
  
“Destroyed,” Sam confirms. “We’re coming to you.”  
  
Bucky follows Natasha down the hallway. The ends of her short blond hair brush along her shoulders as she moves quickly. A creak behind him raises the hairs on the back of his neck and he pauses, looking over his shoulder. The hallway is empty. When he turns back, before his brain can catch up to what’s happening, a loud siren sounds and red lights flash, and a wall appears from nowhere, descending rapidly down from the ceiling, separating them. He hears Natasha shouting his name seconds before it slams to the floor and she’s gone.  
  
Bucky rushes forward to bang his hands against the barrier. It’s solid, even to the force from his Vibranium arm, and he can’t hear her anymore.  
  
“Willkommen zurück, Soldat.”  
  
Blood turns to ice in his veins. His spine straightens, shoulders tightening, ready to obey. _No! _he shouts inside his own mind, deliberately putting his head down, disobeying. Thinking for himself, making a _choice_. But he knows her voice. He turns, fingers curled tightly around the gun in his hand, but he can’t lift it to fire. He tries. He’s frozen.  
  
Her smile is unkind. It always was, although he was in no state to contextualize that, the last time. Dark hair, pulled too tightly off her face, leaving harsh lines. Eyes with no life in them, like she’s already dead even though she’s standing in front of him, breathing and speaking and dragging him back down into shadowy depths he swore he’d never return to.  
  
“желаниe,” she says, beginning his trigger words.  
  
Molars clench, his jaw squeezes until it aches, but his skin doesn’t prickle. The hairs on his arms don’t stand at attention. He manages a cruel smile, to match hers.  
  
“Pжавый.”  
  
“That doesn’t work anymore.”  
  
“Bist du dir da sicher?” she asks, condescending. Mocking him, like they always did.  
  
“Try it, if you want,” he returns, refusing to answer her in German. He is not their Soldat. He’s James Barnes. He’s from Brooklyn. He’s the descendant of immigrants, but he’s American. He isn’t what they tried to turn him into.  
  
Her smile grows colder. “Fine,” she relents. “We have other methods. I’m sure you remember.”  
  
He inhales sharply as the wall behind him lifts again, and his arms are grabbed by two sets of strong hands, clenching tight, dragging him as he struggles.  
  
“Where’s Natasha?” he shouts, heart pounding, trying in vain to throw them off.  
  
He gets no answer.  
  
* * *  
  
  
She plays it well, rehearsed in the drama of pretending to be a damsel in distress to throw her adversaries off their game and then attacking when their guard is lowered just enough. Three Hydra agents are dead before they know what hits them, and Natasha kicks the closet door down and emerges back into the hallway. The trap-wall is gone, and so is Bucky.  
  
“Shit,” she mutters.  
  
“Nat, what’s going on?” Steve is asking, urgently, in her ear.  
  
“Can you guys handle the south block?” she asks. There are still rooms of sleeping agents – although they likely aren’t sleeping anymore. She can take down three by herself, but probably not a dozen.  
  
“Why?” Steve demands. “What happened?”  
  
“They got Bucky,” she tells him, steeling for the blowback as she starts to jog down the hall in opposite direction. Before Steve can splutter out a response, she orders, “do _not_. Take out the south block with Sam, I’ve got this.”  
  
“How the fuck –” Steve begins, angry but she hears the fear underneath it.  
  
“The south block,” she repeats, not giving him room to argue. The last thing they need is Steve slipping, like he did in Lagos. Like Sam warned, when she’d suggested bringing Bucky along in the first place. “I’ve got this, Rogers.”  
  
She tunes out his reply. Two more agents rush at her, and she spins in the air and aims a kick at one’s chest, shooting the other before he can grab her. She levels two extra bullets into each of them, just to be sure, and then pushes her hair out of her face and carries on.  
  
Rounding a corner too fast, she skids on the floor and then scrambles to retreat, hiding back behind a doorframe and cautiously peering around it into a large room. Bucky is in the centre of it, strapped to an upright metal frame. He’s been stripped of his suit and weapons, down to just his underwear. An older woman is standing before him with a bloody knife in one hand, and Natasha counts eight agents surrounding, armed to the teeth and standing guard. She leans back against the wall and covers her face with her hands, internally screaming a litany of curses. Exactly, precisely what she’d _promised _Steve wouldn’t happen, is happening right before her eyes.  
  
Bucky cries out as the woman drags the knife slowly up the inside of his left thigh, creeping sickeningly close to his genitals before she pulls it back at the very last second before she does damage that couldn’t be reversed.  
  
“Bucky?” Steve’s voice breathes, brokenly, in Natasha’s ear. They must have removed Bucky’s earpiece when they stripped him, but now that she’s close enough, Steve can hear him again.  
  
“Fuck,” Natasha hisses, squeezing her hands into fists so tight her eyes water as the woman repeats the action up the inside of Bucky’s other leg and he groans in pain, although it’s muffled like he’s trying desperately to hold it back. To keep from giving them the satisfaction.  
  
“Nat,” Steve begs. “Nat, what’s going on? What are they doing?”  
  
She swears again. “I can’t get to him, there’s too many …”  
  
“He’s gone, Soldat,” the woman says. She holds Bucky’s white undershirt in her other hand and wipes the flat of the knife along it to clean it, leaving a smear of his own blood behind, bright scarlet and horrible. “He won’t be coming for you.”  
  
“You’re lying,” Bucky grunts at her.  
  
“He begged, before my men killed him. Just as you will.” She clicks her tongue in mock sympathy, and her smile is serpentine and haunting. “Although we are going to play with you, first. For a while longer.”  
  
Bucky doesn’t answer. He breathes heavily, the air rattling in his lungs. Natasha can hear it from across the room.  
  
“I wonder if you remember what you did for us, in this place,” the woman continues. She twirls the knife in her fingers. “Would you like to see?”  
  
“_Fuck _you,” Bucky spits.  
  
Another click of her tongue. “Not very polite. No matter, you will be easy enough to re-train.”  
  
She flicks her free hand, signaling to one of the agents, who breaks position and jogs to the far corner of the room. He wheels over an old-fashioned television set on a metal cart. The woman steps closer to Bucky, dragging the knife along his cheek, lighter than before but still enough pressure to draw blood. Then she steps back and signals again, and the agent presses a button on the television. Grainy footage flickers onto the screen, of the same loading dock they’ve been monitoring for weeks, but from a high angle. A security camera. Natasha squints to see. Shadowy figures approach. As they come closer, she realizes it isn’t a lack of light that makes them look shadowed, but their dark skin. She recognizes their uniforms, with her stomach sinking. War Dogs. Members of the Wakandan intelligence service.  
  
“We know where you’ve been hiding out,” the woman says. “A nice little trick you’ve played on them, letting them shield you from us, after the pain you’ve caused.”  
  
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bucky breathes. He tips his head back again, letting it thunk against the metal frame that holds him up.  
  
Angrily, the woman stalks toward him and roughly grabs his chin, forcing him to look back at the screen. “You will.”  
  
In her ear, Sam says, “there wasn’t a wall here before, what the fuck?”  
  
She can’t answer. She watches in horror as on the screen, the Winter Soldier appears behind the War Dogs and shoots them, in the back of the head like an execution, one, two, three, and they drop to their knees and then fall, lifeless, to their faces on the ground. She covers her mouth to muffle the sob that threatens to spring free and reveal her position. She can’t see Bucky’s face from where she is, but she can tell from the cruel smirk on the woman’s face that the desired effect was beyond achieved.  
  
“You belong with us, sweet boy,” she simpers inauthentically, petting his cheek, getting blood on her fingertips. On the screen, the Soldier takes one of the bodies by its ankles and begins to drag it away, leaving a trail of blood in the sand. “We’ve let you play house with your new African friends long enough. It’s time to come home.”  
  
Something inside Natasha snaps when Bucky whimpers; the smallest, most heartbreaking sound she’s ever heard. She stands, and is half a second away from charging into the room, fully prepared to be stopped well before she can get to him, when there is a crash behind her. Steve and Sam appear, both wild-eyed and breathing hard, and silent communication passes through the three of them in the space of a breath. Steve and Sam burst through the open door, Sam firing as he goes and Steve blocking bullets with the shields attached to his forearms. Natasha runs, dodging and spinning out of the line of fire, letting Steve and Sam take the brunt of the attack as she sprints toward Bucky.  
  
She puts a bullet unsympathetically right between the woman’s eyes, watching with sadistic pleasure as she collapses. It dissolves instantly when her attention turns to Bucky. He’s gone nearly limp, held up only by the restraints around his arms and chest, blood dripping down his skin from multiple wounds. His face is streaked with tears. Steeling her emotions, Natasha goes quickly about loosening the straps and then tearing them away from his body, until he’s free and collapses down into her arms. She grunts, muscles straining under the effort of holding him up.  
  
“Bucky,” she says, sharply, and then softens her tone. “Can you stand?”  
  
He nods, and with a shuddered breath he comes back to himself enough to lift his weight mostly off her.  
  
“We have to go.”  
  
She wants to hold him, to run her fingers through his hair and let him fall on her until they both hit the floor, but they need to move. The chorus of guns fired and punches thrown is loud around them, echoing off the walls as she helps him to the back door, down a short hallway and out into the cold night air. A few steps away from the building and he deflates again, stumbling against her and she stumbles too, ending up on her knees on the ground with his big body pliant and quivering in her arms.  
  
“It’s okay,” she whispers, hugging him as tightly as she can, spilling bitter tears into his hair. “I got you, you’re safe.”  
  
“Nat,” he mumbles, pathetically, and there’s nothing she could say to make it better. There’s nothing she can ever say to erase the fact that if she hadn’t insisted he come with them, none of this would have happened. He’s bloodied and bruised and shattered inside and it’s entirely her fault. Yet another name to add to the ever-growing list of people she’s cared for and let down.  
  
She startles when the door they’d escaped through bangs open, but it isn’t agents. Sam and Steve run toward them, bloody themselves but alive. Steve goes hard to his knees, grabbing for Bucky, and Natasha hands him over before falling back to her ass in the dirt.  
  
“I’m so sorry,” she breathes, needing Steve to hear it, needing desperately for him to know she’d never wanted this, even if she doesn’t expect him to ever forgive.  
  
Steve cradles Bucky in his arms, and doesn’t answer her.  
  
* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Dein Käpt’n kann dich dieses Mal nicht retten.” – “Your ‘Captain’ cannot save you this time.”
> 
> “Willkommen zurück, Soldat.” – “Welcome back, Soldier.”
> 
> “Bist du dir da sicher?” – “Are you sure?” (condescending) 
> 
> Thank you to my lovely Carly for the German translations.


	8. Escape

There’s ringing in his ears. Like static over a cut phone line. Buzzing, constant, vibrating within his skull. A prickle of skin, warmth oozing along it before it turns to cold. Blood, he understands. His blood. Leaking slowly from places where he was sliced open. Drip, drip. Onto the sand below. Life filtering out of his body. There’s little point in trying to stop it.  
  
Someone is talking, close to his ear. Harsh tones, desperate words. Squeezing around his body, arms pinned down. Helpless.  
  
“Bucky.”  
  
“Steve, I’m –”  
  
“I know you’re sorry, Nat, I can’t deal with that right now!”  
  
He’s jostled, roughly shaken. More blood drips.  
  
“Buck! Why can’t he hear me?”  
  
_I can_, Bucky says. His lips don’t move.  
  
“He’s in shock.” Wilson’s voice. Sam, Sam’s voice. Sam, who looks like them, who reminds Bucky in his compromised state of his friend Gabe, from the war. Bucky had never met a dark-skinned person before. He’d seen some around the docks but never been introduced. The world told him they were different. But Gabe wasn’t different. He was nice. He made them laugh. Sam makes them laugh.  
  
“Take him up.” Captain America returns. No trace of emotion, or weakness. “We gotta do another sweep of the building, make sure we got everyone.”  
  
Noises of agreement. The arms around him let him go.

_Don’t let go_, Bucky tries to beg. He has nightmares of falling, sometimes. His hand grasping Steve’s until it slips, and Steve reaches for him but it’s too late, and he’s falling, and falling, and falling.  
  
He’s only alone for a moment. Someone else’s arms find him, just as strong, wrapping around him just as tight. “Can you hold on?” Sam asks.  
  
_Yes_. But his limbs don’t work.  
  
“Barnes. Bucky, I need you to help me, okay? I can’t lift you on my own.”  
  
He tries. He strains, jaw clenched, muscles aching, and manages to wrap his arms around Sam’s shoulders. Blood stains his uniform.  
  
“That’s it,” Sam says gently. “Hold on tight.”  
  
The night air is cold, lapping at his bare skin. Rivulets of blood trail down his legs, over his knees. Past his calves and ankles, falling into the abyss. Left forever in the sand. Like theirs. He wonders how long it took, before wind and rain and erosion carried all traces of it away. How long the stains of their deaths lingered on the ground where they took their final breaths. He wonders if their families ever knew what happened to them. He wonders if _his _family knew. Would the army have told them he was captured, and tortured, and fell from a train? Or were the details kept vague to spare his mother? How long did they live? How many decades was he Hydra’s weapon, his identity erased like chalk off a blackboard, while his mother and father and feisty little sister were still alive, with no idea what was happening to their son and brother?  
  
“Look at me.”  
  
Bucky blinks. He’s seated on a table, in the medical suite. Only days ago, he’d stood right where Sam is standing now, berating an injured Steve for not being more careful. He finds Sam’s brown eyes, focuses on them, anchoring himself to them. Pain starts to kick back in, where before there’d been nothing but static.  
  
“Sam,” he croaks, as if his voice has gone unused for centuries.  
  
“There he is,” Sam says, with a smile. “You’re gonna be fine, kid. None of these cuts are very deep. I just need to clean them and wrap them up and you’ll be good as new.”  
  
“I killed them.” Bucky tries to breathe but it comes in shudders, shaking in his chest.  
  
Sam frowns. “Killed who? Hydra?”  
  
Bucky shakes his head. He can’t, he _can’t_, but no, not Hydra. The words won’t come.  
  
“Relax, just breathe for me,” Sam’s voice is saying, hands warm on Bucky’s shoulders. He’s gone for a moment, and returns with bandages and cotton pads and hydrogen peroxide. It stings, when he wipes at the wounds, the long slices up the insides of Bucky’s thighs, the ones on his flesh arm, the patterns carved into his chest. But only briefly. Then he’s gently spreading soothing ointment onto them, and taping bandages to Bucky’s skin. Covering them, making it so they never happened.  
  
“I have to go get them,” Sam says, jostling Bucky gently when he doesn’t respond. Bucky nods numbly. “Don’t move, we’ll be right back.”  
  
It’s only a minute before there’s clamoring in the hallway. Bucky doesn’t look up. He stares at the floor a few feet out, fixated on drying drops of his own blood on the white laminate. If it’s porous enough, they’ll stain forever.  
  
They burst through the door, Steve rushing over and anxiously asking Bucky if he’s okay. Bucky doesn’t answer. What would it mean, to say yes? His wounds aren’t life threatening. He’ll survive, in the literal definition of the word. His heart will keep beating. He’s survived much worse. But maybe it would be better, for everyone, if this time he didn’t. Maybe it’s time he stopped taking up space he hasn’t earned.  
  
“The wounds were shallow,” Sam reports. “He’ll be alright.”  
  
Warm hands are on his face, gently tilting his head up. Bucky finds blue eyes. Dark blond eyebrows furrowed. Blood on Steve’s face, too, and dirt smeared on his cheek. He’s beautiful anyway. Golden, sunshine; he’s always, always been sunshine. A lifelong addiction, chasing the indescribable high of making Steve laugh, or blush, or sigh happily. Bucky was never able to resist him. Never wanted to. Never deserved his light but always stole it, selfishly.  
  
“Hey,” Steve says, voice soft, thumb brushing lightly under Bucky’s eye.  
  
“Steve,” Bucky whispers.  
  
“Yeah, I’m right here.” Steve moves in a little closer, hips pushing between Bucky’s spread knees. “I’m so sorry, that shouldn’t have happened.”  
  
Bucky swallows. His head hangs. He can’t look into those eyes. Steve always sees through him. Always sees to his core, to his flaws and his fears and his constant, crushing failures. Bucky can’t let him see this. Steve will never forgive him. And he’ll deserve it.  
  
In the corner, a soft, unhappy sound catches Steve’s attention, and for a moment he looks away.  
  
“Nat, what happened?”  
  
“We got separated. I tried …”  
  
“Nobody blames you,” Sam tells her. He goes over to her, puts a hand on her shoulder. Bucky’s glad of it. She should be comforted.  
  
“Nat,” Steve says again.  
  
She exhales harshly. “He was there, before. Like he thought. They had old footage, of …”  
  
“Of what?”  
  
Bucky tries to shrink into himself, tries to will the floor to open up and drop him through it, let him fall 30 feet down to the ground, let the impact shatter his body into a million pieces that even Shuri couldn’t put back together. _Shuri_. His friend, his rescuer. The girl who reminds him of his little sister. Who teases him and listens to him and makes him smile. The one who believes in him so furiously she developed a Vibranium arm that only he can remove, without a fail-safe in case he’s compromised again.  
  
“Wakandans,” Natasha continues, sealing Bucky’s coffin. It isn’t her fault. It’s his, and he has no right to ask her to lie. “War Dogs, it looked like. They came to the base, and he …”  
  
“I killed them,” Bucky says. It hurts in his throat to admit it, but it’s his sin. She shouldn’t have to bare it. “Executed them, like it was nothing.”  
  
For a moment, it’s as if time stops. Everything slows down, his breath, the blood still in his veins, the throbs of pain along the cuts with his heartbeat. Then it increases to compensate, and soft lips are pressed to his forehead, and strong arms go around his shoulders, pulling him in close. Bucky resists. He doesn’t push Steve away but he doesn’t hug him back. He can’t.  
  
“I’m so sorry,” Steve says again, in a whisper this time, words pressed into Bucky’s hair.  
  
He trembles. Reality sinks in even stronger than before. Bucky’s hands shake and his pulse races. Tears spill over again, much as he tries to stop them, wetting his cheeks and the shoulder pad of Steve’s uniform. He can’t hold any of it back, it all tumbles out like an avalanche.  
  
“They gave me a home,” Bucky forces out. Misery consumes him, flooding every cell in his body, complete and crushing. “I betrayed them.”  
  
For what must be the millionth time, Steve says, “it wasn’t your fault.”

Bucky’s never had so much trouble believing him.  
  
* * *  
  
  
Wakanda has been a place of reprieve since Steve first stepped foot in it nearly half a year ago. It has offered him new friendships, a respite from the world, a place to leave Bucky where Steve knew he’d be protected and provided for. A place where he could heal. Steve could sleep at night on their missions knowing that, even if Bucky wasn’t happy every minute of the day, at least he was _safe _in Wakanda. Steve still worried about him, but he worried about the nightmares, and about Bucky blaming himself for things that weren’t his fault without Steve there to counter those voices in his head. He never worried Bucky was in physical danger.  
  
That sense of peace is shaken, now. It’s not gone entirely. He doesn’t expect retaliation. He has more faith in T’Challa than that. But it’s painful to consider asking him to overlook this and carry on offering Bucky the amnesty that no one else on earth would have offered him. Even though he insists, over and over to Bucky, that it isn’t his fault. Because it isn’t. That just doesn’t make it easier to bear. Steve can’t begin to imagine how Bucky feels, and can’t think of anything he could say to lessen it.  
  
“We really messed everything up. I’m sorry.”  
  
They’re in the hallway outside Shuri’s lab. It’s crisp and empty, walls barren and cold where mere weeks ago they might have felt inviting. She’s tending to Bucky, and Bucky didn’t want Steve to stay. Steve had tried, valiantly but probably not successfully, to hide how much it hurt to hear that.  
  
“Apologies are not necessary.”  
  
“Yes, they are.” Steve looks at him, tries to convey genuine contrition in his face, because he feels it. They arrived back in Wakanda only hours ago, and already T’Challa has dispatched a team of War Dogs to the base in Kazakhstan to handle the clean-up. Steve’s team had no ability to do that on their own, even if Bucky hadn’t been hurt. And they’re all international fugitives. They couldn’t exactly stroll into the American embassy in Nur-Sultan and ask to speak to someone about three dozen dead bodies and a stockpile of weapons-grade uranium in the mountains. “We knew we were in over our heads, and we dove in head-first anyway. We should have come to you sooner.”  
  
T’Challa regards him silently. Steve is on a bench, elbows on his knees, and T’Challa is opposite him, leaning against the wall. His regal outfit is purple and gold, long and flowing. He nods. “I appreciate that. But I also understand that in the heat of battle, sometimes mistakes are made. It does no good to berate ourselves for them afterward. Only to learn from them.”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“What did you learn, Captain?”  
  
Steve huffs out a laugh, and rubs his hands over his face, digging his fingertips into his eye-sockets. “Can I get back to you on that?”  
  
“If you’d like. Although you do not owe me an explanation. Perhaps just one to yourself.”  
  
“The families, of the people he shot …”  
  
“Have been notified. And he is not responsible for their deaths. Hydra killed them. Sergeant Barnes was simply their weapon. Please relate that message to him. No blame rests on his shoulders.”  
  
Emotion backs up in Steve’s throat, and he doesn’t answer.  
  
T’Challa comes over and sits next to him on the bench. “Would you like to discuss it?”  
  
“One month,” Steve says, staring at his hands. He can still see Bucky’s blood on them in his mind. Can still picture Bucky’s trembling shoulders and blank, emotionless expression. “He was away from this place and under my supervision for _one month_, and I managed to let him get captured by Hydra and tortured, _again_.”  
  
“Things are not your doing simply because you were present when they happened.”  
  
“I’m so stupid. I threw away everything I had, all to choose him, when the world made me choose. And I can’t even keep him safe.”  
  
“Perhaps it is not your duty to keep him safe.”  
  
Steve exhales and closes his eyes briefly against a wave of nausea.  
  
“I worry for my Nakia every time she embarks upon a treacherous mission. But it is not for me to trail after her and make sure she is never in danger. I understand the comparison is imperfect. She has not been through the horrors that your Sergeant Barnes has. But he is not helpless.”  
  
“Whose job is it to protect him, if not mine? No one else cares about him.”  
  
T’Challa looks sideways at him, and Steve’s stomach drops, guilt sinking through his chest and pulling him under where it’s hard to breathe.  
  
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”  
  
“I have not had the pleasure of knowing him as well as some do, here. But my sister cares for him very deeply. I imagine Falcon and Agent Romanov do as well. You are not responsible for the entire world, Captain. You have friends and allies. Allow them to help you.”  
  
Steve nods, and it’s his instinct to argue, but he doesn’t. T’Challa departs after a friendly handshake, and Steve makes his way into the lab. Bucky is seated on a table, his Vibranium arm removed and held in his other hand. He’s holding it out, and Shuri is refusing to take it.  
  
“It’s yours,” she’s saying, sounding upset.  
  
“I’m not saying you have to destroy it.” Bucky looks pained, and exhausted. Like he’s aged ten years overnight. “Thank you, for making it for me. I just can’t trust myself with it right now.”  
  
“Bucky.”  
  
“Please just keep it, for a while?” he asks.  
  
She hesitates. She stares at him, motionless, but then she does take the arm, laying it gently into a black box with cushioned lining. As Steve approaches, he sees her angrily wipe tears from her cheeks, and send him a dirty look. She pokes him roughly in the arm as she walks by, and mutters to herself, terse words about how Steve is lucky Bucky is okay and that she would have skinned him alive if Bucky had been more seriously injured.  
  
She doesn’t know the extent to which his injuries are internal. Steve swallows, and accepts the tirade, even though she says it mostly to herself as she storms away from them.  
  
“She’ll get over it,” Bucky says quietly.  
  
“She cares about you. I get that.”  
  
“You didn’t do anything wrong.”  
  
“Neither did you,” Steve says, pointedly, and Bucky just shrugs.  
  
“Am I being kicked out?”  
  
Steve moves in closer, happy when Bucky lets him. He takes Bucky’s cheeks in his hands and presses a long kiss to his forehead. “Of course not.”  
  
“I don’t know how I can stay here,” Bucky whispers. His hand stays by his side. Withdrawing back into himself, not wanting to touch. “How I can look these people in the eye, knowing I killed three of them.”  
  
“Over 30 years ago, when you’d been brainwashed.”  
  
Bucky shakes his head sadly.  
  
“Soldiers die in battle.” Steve’s fingers tangle in his hair, stroking gently through it. “I know it’s hard to take. I know how awful you must feel, but … Buck, they’d stumbled onto a Hydra base. If you hadn’t killed them, someone else would have. They weren’t leaving that place alive either way. None of that is your doing.”  
  
“You were right.”  
  
Steve frowns. “About what?”  
  
“I shouldn’t have gone with you. I wasn’t ready.”  
  
He’s so despondent, shoulders slumped and voice flat, and Steve’s heart aches in his chest. All he wants, all he’s ever wanted, is for Bucky to be happy, to love him and take care of him, to shout about how much he loves him from rooftops. Instead he’s always letting him down. Always.  
  
* * *  
  
  
The streets below bustle with activity, as he stands on the balcony with his hands on the railing and watches. Motorized bikes weaving around pedestrians, vendors at their stalls, people in a hurry, others out for a leisurely morning stroll. There’s a pleasing mix of old and new – some in traditional, colorful dress and others in modern denim and light-up shoes. Caught halfway between the past and the future, in a way that would only work in this place. And they all, every single one of them, look like him. Skin like his and hair like his. There’s a strange sense of belonging, when he’s here, even though in reality he doesn’t belong here at all. This isn’t his home, these aren’t really his people. They’ve been isolated from the world for centuries, completely removed from history, unaware until recently of global suffering. But he still feels that connection.  
  
Inside the suite, Natasha is seated on the white couch in sweatpants and one of Sam’s old hoodies. Its long sleeves and drooping shoulder seams make her look a lot smaller than she is. Her legs are tucked up, heels resting on the edge of the cushion and arms wrapped around her knees. She’s staring off into space, dark circles under her green eyes, and doesn’t notice him coming back into the room. She startles a little when he sits next to her, and he smiles in apology and reaches out to curl his fingers over her forearm.  
  
She smiles back, but it’s brief, and tired, and doesn’t reach her eyes. Hating the energy he can feel pouring off her, Sam lifts his arm in offering, and she rests against him.  
  
“It’s not your fault,” he says to her, quietly.  
  
“Has to be somebody’s fault,” she argues, in a low, soft voice. “It isn’t Steve’s or yours. Certainly isn’t Bucky’s.”  
  
“How about the people who hurt him?” Sam points out. “Feels like they deserve a good amount of the blame.”  
  
She doesn’t answer. He wraps his other arm around her, keeping her close.  
  
* * *  
  
  
Everything looks the same. The same tall trees surrounding the village, the same reddish-brown huts with thatched roofs and colorful cloth doors, the same vast fields in the distance, the same still, warm lake near his hut. The place that has been his home, the place where he’s lived and eaten and slept every night for almost half a year. The rounded walls within which he and Steve had found each other again, when Steve stayed with him for a few weeks after he’d come out of cryostasis. Where they’d held each other for the first time since 1945, where he’d relearned the taste of Steve’s lips and the sound of his laugh and the warmth and safety of his arms. Bucky’s possessions, meager as they are, all still in his hut. His cookware, his clothing, the books he’s borrowed, the kimoyo beads Shuri gave him that allowed him to stay connected with Steve even when he was far away.  
  
It’s all the same. And at the same time, it’s vastly, irreparably changed.  
  
There is a small package wrapped in brown paper on his bed, when he enters his hut alone. He’d left Steve at the palace, in a meeting with Sam and Natasha and the King about their disaster of a mission. Bucky should maybe have stuck around for it, but he couldn’t face it. He’d snuck away when no one was looking and embarked on the long walk back to the Border Tribe. It had been relatively deserted when he’d arrived; too hot today for people to be lingering outside. Bucky wonders if they know what he’s done. He wonders if they’d ever forgive him, if they did.  
  
The package feels like a book, and Bucky tears open the paper carefully to reveal a red cover that he instantly recognizes. It’s his. One of the journals he’d kept in Bucharest. They began as a way to make sure he wouldn’t forget important things like his address or his name. Then he’d made lists in them, of all the things he could remember, expanding on them when more details would come back to him. Then he’d started collecting images and words from newspapers and magazines, every time something jogged a memory. He had about a dozen of them, by the time he was captured, but the red one he holds in his hand now had been the most important. The one he’d devoted entirely to pictures and memories of Steve, and the one he wasn’t able to take with him when he ran, because unlike the others it had been out in the open instead of in his knapsack under the floorboards. He should have kept it hidden and ready to go with the rest of them. But he needed it. Needed to look at it every day, needed to fall asleep with the blue of Steve’s eyes fresh in his mind.  
  
He holds the back cover in his hand and tips it so the front cover will flip open, and a folded piece of paper falls out. Bucky frowns down at it, bending over to pick it up, reading the messy printing in blue ink.  
  
_Hey, Cap._  
  
_This was recovered in the sweep of Barnes’ apartment. They had it in a box at SHIELD with all his other sad possessions. I’ll get in shit if they find out I took it, so keep your trap shut and I won’t reveal I know where you’re hiding him. Deal? Mutually assured destruction. I thought you should have it._  
  
_Tony_  
  
Bucky folds it up again and tucks it back into the inside cover. He’s too exhausted, too overwhelmed by a hundred other things, to react to it right this second. Instead he flips through the pages, looking at newspaper articles and large, glossy pictures of Steve in his Captain America cowl and uniform. His own handwriting covers the pages. Fractured pieces of memories, of Brooklyn, of the fire escape outside their building, of Coney Island, of their school, of double-dates, of secret kisses under the cover of thin blankets, of getting his call-up papers, of deploying to Europe and missing Steve so much it ached in his chest, of finding each other again in army barracks and make-shift tents. Next to a paragraph about what kissing Steve had felt like, Bucky had written _first time??? _and he recalls that he was never able to remember their very first kiss. He’d tried, for weeks, to no avail. He still can’t. Steve probably does, but Bucky has never asked him.  
  
He closes the journal and lets it drop back down onto the bed. He sits beside it, and then tips over to lie down, curling himself into a ball and hugging his arm around his middle. Pushing his face into the pillow brings back familiar scents, the brown nut-butter soap he uses here and lingering traces of Steve. Four short weeks ago, Bucky was beginning to feel reborn in this place. As if his past was truly behind him, save for the lingering flashbacks and nightmares. As if he could move forward. He’ll never forget the things he did or the things that were done to him, but he was starting to learn how to emerge from those shadows. Now they creep back in, darker than ever, and swallow him whole.  
  
* * *  
  
  
The walk to the Border Tribe from the city center is usually a pleasant enough journey. It’s scenic, and usually when Steve makes it, he’s just landed in Wakanda and is on his way to visit Bucky after being away from him for much longer than either of them would like, so there’s a skip in his step. As the sun begins to set beyond the mountains in the distance, Steve walks his usual path slower than he might have another day, dreading what he’s going to find. He’d seen Bucky slip away, earlier at the palace, and hadn’t stopped him. He’s been through enough, Steve figured. He didn’t need to sit through a long debriefing meeting when the other three had all the information between them that T’Challa would need.  
  
W’Kabi is in the pen with the rhinos, as Steve approaches, and he waves. Steve returns it, stopping briefly by the fencing to chat.  
  
“I hear things didn’t go very well,” W’Kabi says, scrunching up his nose sympathetically.  
  
Steve nods and sighs. “Wasn’t a complete disaster, but not as well as they could have.”  
  
W’Kabi nods, and then tosses his head back and to the left, indicating direction. “Your boy’s with his goats.”  
  
Steve looks over, and a few dozen feet away he notices a flash of blue robes before it disappears behind a tree.  
  
“Is he alright?”  
  
Honestly, Steve answers, “I don’t know.”  
  
Another solemn nod. “We’ll keep an eye on him. If you have to go.”  
  
“I might be sticking around for a while this time,” Steve says.  
  
W’Kabi claps him on the arm. “Happy to have you.”  
  
“Thanks.” Steve forces a smile, and then forces himself to keep going.  
  
Bucky is sitting on the ground, facing in the opposite direction. Around him, black and brown goats mill about, munching on the grains he’d scattered around their enclosure. When Steve gets a little closer, he notices a small one in Bucky’s lap, curled up contentedly as Bucky gently strokes its head. The sight of it warms some cold spots within Steve, and for a moment he hangs back and watches, until Bucky realizes he’s there, turning his head just slightly before looking back down.  
  
“Did you talk to Natasha?” he asks.  
  
Steve presses his lips together. He itches to reach out and haul Bucky to his feet and hug him so tight neither of them can breathe. “Yeah.”  
  
“Tell her not to blame herself?”  
  
“I told her. But I don’t think any of us are very good at that.”  
  
“Good at what?”  
  
“Not blaming ourselves. Even when everyone else is telling us something wasn’t our fault.”  
  
Bucky exhales noisily through his nose. The sound startles the baby goat, who gets up disgruntledly and trots back over to its mother.  
  
Unable to resist any longer, Steve steps closer to him, bending down and putting his hands on Bucky’s rounded shoulders. The piece of cloth is back over the empty socket, wrapped and knotted across his chest to hide it. His remaining arm rests on his knee, leaning heavily on it now that the goat has moved on.  
  
“It’s okay if you have to leave,” Bucky says in a level voice. “I’ll be fine.”  
  
“I’m not leaving. Can you please get up?”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“‘Cause I’m having a really terrible day, and I wanna hug you.” It’s the truth. It’s just not all of it.  
  
Bucky exhales again, but he does stand, slowly turning to face Steve. The cut on his cheek is still red, a raised line down the slope of his skin. With his robes covering most of his body, Steve can’t see any of the bandages protecting his other injuries. He doesn’t need to, to recognize the pain in Bucky’s eyes. His head tilts to the side, expression pleading. Pleading for what, exactly, Steve isn’t sure – pleading Steve to go, or to stay, or to help him forget, or to make it all better – but pleading nonetheless, and it’s a dagger in Steve’s heart.  
  
He holds a hand out, not willing to take from Bucky something he isn’t wanting to give, and thankfully Bucky takes it and lets Steve pull him into a deep kiss. He leans into it, tipping Bucky backwards a few inches, sliding their lips together slowly and fully, every ounce of himself poured into it. Bucky is breathing heavily when they part, foreheads still pressed together. Steve’s boots are touching Bucky’s bare feet, as close as they could be without fusing into one person. Sometimes Steve wishes they could.  
  
“Steve,” Bucky whispers.  
  
“I love you,” Steve tells him, not fighting the emotion that seeps into his voice. “I love you to the moon, I love you since before we met and until the end of time.”  
  
Buck sniffs, and pulls himself out of Steve’s arms. Steve clenches his jaw to combat the sob that threatens to burst from his chest, but then Bucky nods his head, indicating for Steve to follow him back into his hut. Bucky walks over to his sleep mat, picking up a red book and handing it to Steve.  
  
“Stark sent it,” Bucky says, gaze shifting to the ground between them. “There’s a note.”  
  
Frowning, Steve pulls the note out and reads it. He remembers this journal. Bucky had walked in on him looking through it, had pretended for a moment he’d only read about Steve at a museum, terrified because he’d been found, and certain Steve was there to throw him in prison for the things Hydra had done. Emotion rises in his throat as he flips through the pages, momentarily choking him. The sight of Bucky’s scrawled memories makes him dizzy. Steve’s own name is written over and over throughout, repeated like a fixation, doodled in collections of stars and flags and music notes. Like Bucky needed to see it every day, needed it to be the foundation upon which he rebuilt his own identity.  
  
“We were 19,” Steve says, voice coming out scratchy, when he comes across a note he thinks was Bucky trying to recall their first kiss and coming up short. “The first time you kissed me.”  
  
He looks up, and Bucky’s eyes are filled with tears. “We were?”  
  
Steve nods. “Three months after my mother died. We’d been living together a few weeks. I ran into a woman from her church, at the store on the corner, and she hugged me and told me how sorry she was. I’d been holding it together pretty good until then, but that broke me a little. I collapsed onto the floor as soon as I was back at our place and started crying, and you were trying to console me. And you kissed me.”  
  
Bucky shakes his head, gaping at Steve with his lips parted. “I tried so hard to remember.”  
  
“You panicked. Started apologizing, saying you didn’t know what came over you, begging me not to hate you.” Steve swallows thickly as the memory plays out in his head. His lips curve into a smile, looking up at Bucky’s distressed face. “I didn’t hate you at all. I’d been in love with you since before I even knew what that meant.”  
  
“Wouldn’t it be easier if you weren’t?” Bucky asks, respiring the words like a gust of wind.  
  
Steve shakes his head determinedly. “No. No fucking way. I know you’re hurting right now, and God I wish I could take it away. If I could absorb every second of pain you’ve endured so you wouldn’t have to feel it anymore, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”  
  
Bucky makes an unhappy noise and roughly brushes his hair back off his forehead.  
  
Steve holds the red journal up and gestures with it. “We’re gonna keep this, this time. Keep it forever. So you never, ever forget how hard you fought to pull yourself out when they tried to erase you.”  
  
He offers it out to Bucky, and Bucky takes it, but doesn’t look at it before he drops it back down onto the blanket.  
  
“The night before I got the serum?” Steve tells him, “Erskine made me promise that no matter what happened, I wouldn’t change who I am. This is who I am, Buck. I care about standing up for what’s right. Whether or not you believe it, you’re a victim. Throwing you away because it’s easier wouldn’t be right.”  
  
“So it’s a sense of duty.”   
  
“Partly.”  
  
Bucky looks at him, a deep frown creasing his forehead, eyes shiny and so sad it takes Steve’s breath away for a moment. “What’s the other part?”  
  
Steve’s lower lip trembles, and he struggles to keep his voice steady as he answers. “The other part is I’m in love with you. I’m here because I want to be. And you can’t talk me out of that either. If that’s not good enough I don’t know what else to tell you.”  
  
“Maybe not everyone gets a second chance,” Bucky says softly.  
  
Steve looks at him, the burn of distress already rising in his throat because he knows where this is going. It’s only for show that he asks, “what does that mean?”  
  
Bucky shrugs. “It means what it means. This isn’t like the movies we used to sneak into, where everything gets tied up in neat little boxes before the credits roll. Maybe in real life not everything is made right in the end, maybe some things just stay wrong.”  
  
“Buck.”  
  
“Maybe not everyone deserves redemption. Maybe I’m the kind of person that doesn’t come home.”  
  
“You are home,” Steve argues weakly. Bucky’s hopeless words drive a knife into his stomach and twist it. “You escaped. You remembered who you are. We found each other again, in a new century, against insane odds, what more home do you need than that?”  
  
“I’m not saying it’s not enough. I’m saying, what if this is it? What if me, broken and angry and fucked in the head, and you hating yourself because you can’t fix it, what if this is as good as it gets?”  
  
“If this is as good as it gets then it’s perfect,” Steve tells him, his voice cracking in desperation. “What kind of happy ending were you imagining for us? We were never going to have a house in the suburbs.”  
  
“You said you wanted that, once.”  
  
“I wanted it when I was a kid, when I was a misfit wanting to be normal, and it’s what I thought I was _supposed_ to want,” Steve protests. It’s so important to him, so vital to his survival, that Bucky understands. “That kind’a life hasn’t been in the cards for me since the moment they put the serum in my veins, and that’s okay, I don’t … I don’t know how you still don’t get it after all this time, that given a choice between anything in the world, and you, I’d still pick you. Always.”  
  
“Maybe I wish you wouldn’t,” Bucky mumbles.  
  
If a heart could actually shatter, Steve’s would have just now. “_Why_?”  
  
“I’m not …”  
  
“Don’t do this again,” Steve begs, teetering on the verge of tears. “You are worth it. I can’t hear you say again that you’re not.”  
  
He hasn’t cried, yet. Not when he’d heard Bucky being tortured, not when he’d had Bucky limp and bleeding in his arms, not in all the hours after when Bucky has been despondent and wounded and quiet and Steve would have given anything for him to scream, sob, put his fist through a wall, but instead Bucky just went _blank_. Steve’s kept it all inside, shoved it down as far as he can bury it, so he can keep putting one foot in front of the other. There wasn’t time to break down. They still had work to do. Now there is time, and he’s barely holding on.  
  
“It’s the truth. You know what I did.”  
  
“Maybe it’s your truth. But it isn’t mine. I would choose you a hundred times, in a hundred different lifetimes.”  
  
Bucky’s hand clenches, and tears spill down his cheeks. Steve can’t stand being so far away any more. He rushes over, gathering Bucky into his arms. Bucky cries into his shoulder, arm wrapped tight around Steve’s waist and grasping at his shirt. He cries noisily, a wounded soul puncturing through the sobs, and Steve cries with him, chest clenched and head hurting and sorrow piling onto what already felt like too much to deal with.  
  
They stumble, knees halfway giving out, and end up on Bucky’s sleeping mat, arms and legs and hearts wrapped around each other. Bucky’s tears leave Steve’s t-shirt soaked, a physical, perceivable indication of his heartbreak. Steve holds him as close as he can and lets Bucky grieve. For the things that he’s lost, for the things he was made to do, for the horrors he’s suffered that still exist inside him like barbed wire wrapped around his heart. He was the sweetest, kindest boy in the entire world, the gentlest soul Steve has ever known. Steve feels the ache of it, deep inside in places no amount of light could ever shine out.  
  
“If this place doesn’t feel enough like home, I’ll make it home,” Steve swears determinedly. The words are spoken against Bucky’s forehead, lips pressed there, promises allowed to seep into his skin. “You have your goats and your new friends. We’ll get you more books, and pictures for the walls, and things that remind you of Brooklyn. And I’ll be here. For a lot longer, this time. For as long as you let me stay.”  
  
Another unsteady sob escapes Bucky’s lips, and Steve holds him tighter.  
  
“You made a home for me, remember? When my mother died, and I felt so alone. You followed me back after the funeral, told me we’d get a place together. You insisted when I tried to be noble and shoulder it all on my own. You wouldn’t let me be alone.” Steve strokes his fingers through Bucky’s hair, remembering his face that day. The tenacity in his bright eyes, the resolve to take care of Steve even if he had to drag Steve kicking and screaming every step of the way. “And inside those four walls you made me feel safe, and valued, and so loved I didn’t even know what to do with it all. I never felt that way again after you were gone, and I’m not letting go of it now. You made me a home when I needed it. So now it’s my turn.”  
  
“Steve,” Bucky rasps.  
  
“There’s nothing I can say to make it easier to deal with all the things they did to you. I can’t tell you how to feel about any of it. All I can say is, I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere. And I’m never, ever giving up on you. Because I don’t know how to be who I am without you. Loving you has meant everything to me, for my entire life.”  
  
“I wanna forget.” His face is pressed into Steve’s neck, nose tucked up against his beard, inhaling in deep shudders. “And then I think I deserve to remember everything. And then I think if I forgot some things, I might forget you again.”  
  
“You never forgot me,” Steve tells him. He kisses Bucky’s wet cheeks, his left and then his right, salt bursting into his lips. “They tried. They tried for 70 years to erase me and they couldn’t.”  
  
“I remembered loving you,” Bucky whispers. His hand slips under Steve’s shirt, warm fingertips dusting over the small of his back.  
  
Steve nudges Bucky’s face with his nose. Bucky opens his eyes, just for a moment, just long enough to glimpse their watery, ocean blue. He’s spent so many hours staring into those eyes. When they were teenagers, and Steve loved him but was terrified of his own heart. When they were a little older, living together and loving each other. When they’d lie together on a cot too small for even one of them, during the war, listening to the wind howl and shelling in the distance. Here, in their new home in Wakanda, enraptured by the way the African sun turns Bucky’s eyes to brilliant aqua and his skin to gold. Steve kisses his lips. Bucky’s devastated, right now, for good reason, but he’s still the person Steve has loved since before he could even understand it. He always will be, no matter what happens to them.  
  
“Hi,” Steve murmurs.  
  
Bucky exhales slowly, and Steve hitches his leg up to hook over Bucky’s waist, drawing him in impossibly closer. “I don’t want to forget you,” he says softly.  
  
“You couldn’t.” Steve curls his fingers around the back of Bucky’s neck, squeezing gently. “Something inside us would keep leading us right back here.”  
  
“Like we’re soulmates or something?” The lilt of Bucky's voice bends the words into a joke, but Steve shrugs.  
  
“Maybe. I wouldn’t have believed it back in Brooklyn. But it turns out aliens exist, and real superpowers, and magic serums that can make people immortal, so who knows what else is real?”  
  
He feels Bucky’s nose in his beard again, nuzzling into him.  
  
“Maybe if we both ever really die, there’s something after this world. Maybe I’ll meet you there.”  
  
“You believe in that stuff?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Steve says honestly. “I used to, when we were little. Then I lost Ma, and I lost you, and it wasn’t so easy anymore. But I’d like to.”

“What do we do about my head?” Bucky asks, with a sniff. “About the flashbacks? They aren’t going away.”

“Sam says we get you some help from someone who knows about that stuff.”

"Like a shrink."

"Would that be so terrible?"  
  
Bucky doesn't answer. Steve slides his hand down Bucky’s flank, feeling one of the bandages underneath his robes. A wave of nausea rolls through him briefly, remembering, but he swallows it, because Bucky doesn’t need pity. Instead he rubs his thumb gently over the bandage.  
  
“I know every inch of this body, better than I know my own. The scar on your thumb from when you fell off your bike when we were six. The toe you broke playing baseball when we were ten that never healed quite straight.”  
  
“Yeah.” Bucky’s breath steadies, and he relaxes under Steve’s hand.  
  
Steve takes a chance, nudging him onto his back, so he can roll on top and kiss Bucky deeply, dipping his tongue in, tasting him. Bucky’s legs part so Steve’s hips can settle between them, nothing but thin fabric separating them.  
  
“The freckles on your nose from a really bad sunburn when we were teenagers, that always come out when you spend too long in the sun,” Steve continues, kissing them as he says it. Brown flecks smattered like dusted cinnamon over Bucky’s golden skin. “They’re always there, now. It always seems to be sunny here.”  
  
Bucky’s hand cups Steve’s face, kissing him again, languid passes of their lips that Steve can feel down to his toes. He moves slowly down, slips sliding over Bucky’s neck and lower. His mouth hovers over Bucky’s shoulder where his Vibranium arm would attach, running the tip of his nose over the long ridges of scar tissue he can feel through blue Wakandan silk.  
  
“These scars used to make my stomach hurt every time I looked at them,” he says, “thinking about what they did to you. Now they remind me of how strong you are.”  
  
Another shaky breath, and Bucky’s fingers tangle in Steve’s hair. It’s long enough lately to tuck behind his ears, longer than it’s ever been in Steve’s life, so it’s enough for Bucky to gather a full handful and tug gently.  
  
Steve keeps moving, finding the raised bumps of bandages underneath the material and tracing his lips over them. Lower still, he pushes Bucky’s robes up, hesitating to give him time to refuse consent but continuing when he doesn’t, until they’re up past his stomach. Bucky rarely wears underwear with his robes so he’s bare, laid out for Steve to examine. Cock halfway to hard against his abdomen, exposed and defenceless, and his thighs still wrapped in white bandages. They conceal where he’d been sliced into, up so close to such vulnerable parts.  
  
Steve moves his fingertips, feather-light up the inside of his thighs, from just above his knee all the way up. Bucky’s breathing increases, chest heaving, but he stays quiet, and Steve’s heart races. “These new ones will probably fade. But if they don’t, I’ll know them, too. Trace my fingers over them if you let me. Remind us both that Hydra tried, again and again and again, to break you and own you, and they never could. You never belonged to them.”  
  
“Yours,” Bucky whispers. “Always been yours.”  
  
Steve runs his nose along Bucky’s cock and kisses it. The skin is soft and warm under his lips, familiar taste and earthy scent, familiar breathless sigh above him when he briefly sucks the head into his mouth. Then he crawls back up, kissing Buck’s chest as he goes, and blankets him, resting with his elbows on either side of Bucky’s head and kissing his lips.  
  
“And I’ve always been yours,” he whispers back.  
  
* * *


	9. Rest

“We’re gonna stay for a while, right?” Sam asks, glancing at her as they walk. They’re nearing the village where Bucky lives. They’d wanted to give him and Steve their space at first, and had stayed away for three days, but then Steve called earlier this morning and asked them to visit. “You said we would.”  
  
She laughs softly and shrugs. “I’m not your mother. Do whatever you want.”  
  
Sam rolls his eyes, but chuckles warmly. “Are _you _gonna stay?”  
  
“For a bit, yeah.” She nods, and breathes deeply. The air is different, here. Fresher, smells sweeter, feels softer and more humid as it fills her lungs. It feels healing. “We said we’d’ve earned a vacation after this one. I think we definitely did.”  
  
“I think we earned about six vacations,” Sam asserts. He raises his hands above his head, stretching as they walk. “But I’ll take a few days on a beach any day of the damn week. And that bed at the palace is all kinds of comfy, someone is gonna have to bribe me to go back to sleeping on the floor of the quinjet.”  
  
“At least until we get antsy.”  
  
“You and Cap are more into all this than I ever was anyway.”  
  
She absorbs his words, and wonders, as she has at least half a dozen times, if she and Steve roped him into a life that he never wanted. When they showed up on his doorstep in DC two years ago, bruised and dirty and desperate, he let them in because he’s a good person. Steve is also that kind of person. Natasha, regardless of the progress she hopes she’s made, isn’t _that_ good. But Sam is. He offered them refuge when they needed it, and he’s been on the hook for their messes ever since.  
  
“Are you saying you want out?” she asks, hoping very much he won’t say _yes _but prepared to accept it if he does, because she has no right to ask any more of him than he’s already given.  
  
To her relief, he shrugs casually, and waves the idea off. “Nah. Wouldn’t leave you two alone out there.”  
  
“You could,” she answers anyway, even though she hopes he won’t. “Nothing’s stopping you.”  
  
“You’re kinda my only friends,” he says, with another grin.  
  
“Likewise.”  
  
“That’s pretty pathetic, isn’t it?”  
  
“Absolutely.”  
  
She’s always been more partial to big cities, but can’t deny the beauty of the countryside. Sprawling pastoral lands dissolve into miles of trees, everything green and lush, with brilliant sunshine beating down on them. As they approach the edge of the Border village, for the first time Natasha sees the giant rhinoceroses Steve has told her about, and they are exactly as massive and amazing and terrifying as he’d said. At least twice as big as any rhino she’s ever seen, their footsteps thundering and their tusks menacing. The huts in the village are small but large enough to be comfortable, mostly brown, with plant-fiber rooves and wooden furniture in front of them, antiquated as if they’ve stepped back in time. They get a few funny looks from the locals, but no one approaches them, so Natasha follows the directions Steve had given her to the edge of a lake and the hut that belongs to Bucky.  
  
She knocks with the backs of her knuckles on the wall next to the doorway, and calls, “put your dicks away, fellas, we’re coming in.”  
  
Inside, Steve’s surprised laughter greets them, and the cloth covering the doorway is lifted to reveal his smiling, bearded face. “Thanks for yelling that loud enough for everyone to hear.”  
  
“I aim to please,” she tells him.  
  
He steps back to let them inside. It’s more or less what Natasha had been picturing, from how Steve described it. Minimal furniture but what is there is ornately carved. A comfortable-looking mat for sleeping in the corner, with two pillows and woven blankets. A small kitchenette, hooks on the far wall for his robes. It’s simple, and she can see someone who’s been through hell and back a hundred times living a quiet, safe, peaceful existence here. It’s exactly what Bucky deserves.  
  
He’s standing across the room in traditional Wakandan robes. Today’s variety is a purple and yellow cross-stitch, that wraps around his waist and drapes over his shoulders. There isn’t a second piece of fabric covering his lack of a left arm. His metal shoulder is visible, red lines on his skin and empty silver socket on display for anyone to see. Strangely, Natasha feels a small burst of pride in her chest, because she knows usually he hides that part of himself. Even after finding something approaching redemption with the Avengers, she can still easily count on her fingers the number of people she truly cares about. This man out of time, with his long hair and his visible scars and his kind smile and his lingering boyish charm, has become one of them.  
  
She goes over to him and pulls him into a hug. He seems surprised just for a moment but then his arm curls around her waist, and he squeezes back. She lets it linger, tries to let it communicate all the things she’s not sure she could say out loud. How sorry she is, for what happened and for dragging him into something he wasn’t ready for. If she’d only listened, when Steve said Bucky deserved to be left alone, they might be visiting him here in an entirely different context. When she pulls back, his eyes are shiny but he’s smiling, and she manages to smile back.  
  
“Doin’ okay?” she asks.  
  
He nods. “I will be. You?”  
  
“I’m always okay,” she says, with an easy shrug.  
  
He sees through its nonchalance. Quiet enough for only her to hear, he says, “you don’t have to be, every time.”  
  
Natasha swallows over the lump that rises in her throat and nods, forcing a smile and keeping the sting of it down. But he’s right, and she hears him. She tucks the advice away, deep inside where no one else can see it. Maybe she’ll give it some real thought, if they’re here for a little while and she doesn’t have chaos barreling down on her at every moment, distracting her from everything else. “Nice place,” she tells him.  
  
“I’m not exactly in a position to be picky. But thanks, I like it well enough.”  
  
“Better or worse than Brooklyn during the Depression?”  
  
He grins. “Different, I guess. Better in some ways.”  
  
“For instance, I,” Steve says, nearly skipping over to them, “can do this and not worry about being arrested for it.”  
  
He grabs Bucky by the waist and pulls him into a kiss. Bucky laughs into it, and behind them, Sam groans loudly.  
  
“Is this what it’s gonna be like from now on? The two of you all lovey-dovey and me and Nat having to carry around barf bags?” he complains, although when Natasha turns to look at him, he’s smiling. They both like seeing Steve happy. Natasha isn’t sure she ever realized how unhappy he truly was, when they first met and he was all alone in a new century with no one who knew or understood him.  
  
Steve says, “yes, deal with it,” at the same time as Bucky firmly says, “fuck no,” and shoves a laughing Steve away from him.  
  
“We were promised a beach,” Sam announces grandly, obtusely changing the subject.  
  
It’s a short walk to a river north of the village, and it’s also exactly as beautiful as Steve had said. An abundance of sunshine, fine white sand, and long-limbed willows dipping their silvery leaves into the clear, turquoise water. Natasha thinks a resort developer could make a killing in this place, and is glad they never will.  
  
Sam’s shirt and jeans are already off while Natasha was distracted by the view, and he’s shoving Steve’s arm jovially and heading for the water. Steve laughs. Natasha tends to savour the moments when any of them are truly happy, because they seem so rare as of late. Before he joins Sam, Steve leans over to kiss Bucky’s cheek, and then he similarly strips to his boxers and follows suit. Bucky’s cheeks go pink, but he can’t hide the smile that curves his lips.  
  
He gestures in front of them with his hand, and turns to Natasha. “After you.”  
  
“I’m good, for right now.”  
  
“Me too.” Instead he sits, in the shade of a massive tree, and she joins him. She kicks her shoes off, and curls her toes in the soft sand.  
  
“I’m –” she begins, but Bucky cuts her off before she can finish the thought.  
  
“Don’t say you’re sorry.”  
  
She turns to him, frowning, but he smiles and shakes his head.  
  
“It’s not your fault,” Bucky says, quiet but forceful. “And yeah, I know, because I wanna think it’s my fault, even though I know you’d tell me it isn’t. Right?”  
  
A moment at a loss for words, and then she breathes out heavily and nods. “Okay. Yes, I would.”  
  
Blue eyes crinkle at the edges, shining with her tiny reflections in their centers. “I talked to someone yesterday. At the palace. Someone who knows about … whatever the word is, for all the ways a person can need help in their brain. And I’m gonna talk to them again, until I’m better. Back in the 40s we’d’ve had all kinds of rude names for it, but maybe it’s not so bad, that in the future it isn’t turned into a joke.”  
  
“Of course.” Natasha presses her lips together until they hurt.  
  
“I have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” Bucky says, grinning a little, almost like he’s proud of it. Or maybe relieved to finally be able to put a name and an explanation to what he’s been dealing with.  
  
“I figured.”  
  
“Everyone knew but me. Apparently flashbacks are common. Except they’re called _dissociative episodes_, in the future.” He shrugs, and looks out over the water where Steve is smiling at them, waist-deep in the river, skin wet and shiny and his long hair dripping on his shoulders. He waves, cheesy like a dad at a kid’s soccer game, and Bucky laughs softly and waves back.  
  
“He really loves you,” Natasha says. She can see it. It radiates off both of them, now that they aren’t actively hiding it. Surrounds them like a light force. Especially Steve. Natasha’s known him for a long time, and thinks she knows him fairly well, and has never seen him glow the way he is right now.  
  
“He does,” Bucky agrees, without any trace of embarrassment.  
  
Guilt still tugs at her insides, but maybe not as strong as before. Because she isn’t sure what else to say, she points out, “you know this isn’t the future. It’s the present.”  
  
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Bucky nod. “You’re right. It’s right now.”  
  
Sam and Steve laugh and splash each other like teenagers in the water. Natasha inches closer to Bucky on the ground, just close enough to lean over and rest her head on his shoulder. He puts his arm around her. There’s warm sand under her feet and her family is safe from harm and, at least for the moment, happy.  
  
For the first time in what feels like months, Natasha fully exhales.  
  
* * *

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!
> 
> [Follow artist yusevna on tumblr](https://yusevna.tumblr.com/)  
[Follow writer paperstorm on tumblr](http://paper-storm.tumblr.com/) or [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/turningthedials)  



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